I am a distinguished professor of robotic vision at QUT and director of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision.  I wrote the textbook Robotics, Vision & Control, authored the MATLAB toolboxes for Robotics and Machine Vision, and created the online educational resource: QUT Robot Academy.

Area of research:  Robotics

I am interested in how robots can use the sense of vision to accomplish a broad range of tasks.   These might range from recognising places or text in the world to dynamic tasks.  An example of a visual dynamic task is something like hand-eye coordination, and for a robot it might be visual control of flying or driving or manipulation of objects. Why vision? Nature has invented the eye ten different times so it must be an effective sensor for doing a diverse range of tasks.  Vision sensors and computing power are getting cheaper and cheaper.  Now is the time to be doing vision for robotics! Some specific topics of interest include:

• The use of visual information for controlling robot motion, a technique known as visual servoing.
• Very wide field-of-view cameras based on fisheye lens and lens/mirror (catadioptric) optical systems.
• Optical flow, how images from a moving robot can be used to infer the world’s 3D structure and the robot’s motion
• Computer architectures for implementing computer vision algorithms in real time
• Stereo vision, using information from one or more cameras to create the 3D world structure.
• The combination with robotics to create mobile sensing systems
• Vision processing within networks of cameras.

I received my Bachelor of Engineering and Master of Engineering Science degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, all from the University of Melbourne. Prior to working at QUT, I was a senior principal research scientist at CSIRO where I founded the Autonomous Systems laboratory, a 50-person team undertaking research in mining, ground, aerial and underwater robotics, as well as sensor networks. Subsequently I led a major cross-organisational “capability platform” in wireless sensor networks.