1346574
Distinguished Emeritus Professor
Peter Corke
Faculty of Engineering,
School of Electrical Engineering & Robotics
Biography
Peter is a robotics researcher, educator and writer. He left full-time university service in January 2024 but maintains a connection to the university and the Centre for Robotics as a distinguished professor emeritus.He was director/codirector of the QUT Centre for Robotics (2020-23), and before that was director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (2014-2020). His research is concerned with robotic perception using vision and force, dynamics and control, and the application of robots to tasks in the mining, agriculture and environmental monitoring sectors. He has held a number of editorial positions including: editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine; founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics; founding multi-media editor and executive editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research; member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series.His contribution has been recognized by fellowship of the IEEE, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, and the Australian Academy of Science.
Peter has served as a consultant to MathWorks (Boston); is currently a technical advisor to LYRO Robotics, Emesent, ARMHub; and chairs the Robotic Council of the Robotics Australia Group.
Peter's true passion is robotics education. He created widely used open-source software (in Python and MATLAB) for teaching and research in robotics and computer vision. He wrote the best selling textbook “Robotics, Vision, and Control”, now in its 3rd edition, and created the Robot Academy. Collectively these assets have taught robotics to millions of students around the world have led to national and international recognition such as the 2017 Australian University Teacher of the Year.
Prior to QUT, Peter founded and led CSIRO's Autonomous Systems Laboratory (2004-2009). He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in electrical engineering and PhD in mechanical and manufacturing engineering, all from the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting positions at Oxford, University of Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania.
Awards and recognitions
- 2019: Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science
- 2017: Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, Australian University Teacher of the year.
- 2016: Eureka Prize Finalist (research and innovation in environmental science), COTSBot team.
- 2015: QS-Wharton: Engineering & IT award (gold); Teaching Delivery award (silver).
- 2015: Australian Office for Learning and Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.
- May 2009: Award in Research and Development for virtual fencing technology, Australian Information Industry Association, Queensland division
- 2008: Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences and Mathematics for Springer Handbook of Robotics, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, Association of American Publishers, Inc.
- June 2008: Finalist (one of five) for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Invention & Entrepreneurship Award (LHD project team)
- Dec 2007: Fellow of IEEE
- 2006: Australian Engineering Excellence award, Engineers Australia (Starbug project team)
- 2006: Innovation award, Engineers Australia, Queensland Engineering Excellence Awards (Starbug project team)
- 1999: Overseas Travel Fellowship, Australian Centre for Field Robotics
- 1996: Finalist (one of five) for the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions Paper Award, S. Hutchinson, G. Hager, and P. Corke, "A Tutorial on Visual Servo Control", IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 12, No. 5, Oct. 1996, pp. 651-670
- 1995: QANTAS Rolls-Royce Engineering Excellence Award (SafeTCam project team)
- 1994: The Honda Award for Best Technology Presentation at ISATA (Aachen).
- 2010-: Professor, QUT
- 2008: Transformational Capability Leader; Sensor Networks, CSIRO
- 2007 - 2008: Research theme leader; Sensor Networks, CSIRO
- 2004 - 2007: Research Director, Autonomous Systems Laboratory, CSIRO ICT Centre
- 2003: Senior Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing and Infrastructure Technology
- 1995: Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Science and Technology
- 1990: Senior Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
- 1989: Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
- 1984: Experimental Scientist, CSIRO Division of Manufacturing Technology
- 1982 - 1983: Lecturer in control and computer architecture, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne.
- 1981:Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne. Also held visiting positions at
- 2009,12,13, 15: Mobile Robotics Group at Oxford University.
- 2003: Robotics Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University
- 1999: U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- 1988-1989: the GRASP laboratory at U.Pennsylvania
- Erdos -> Goldberg -> Camtepe -> Corke
- Erdos -> Subbarao -> Vidyasagar -> (Spong|Hutchinson) -> Corke
- Erdos -> Noga Alon -> Erik Demain -> Daniela Rus -> Corke
Personal details
Positions
- Adjunct Professor
Faculty of Engineering,
School of Electrical Engineering & Robotics
Keywords
Robotic vision, Robotics, Computer Vision, Dynamics & Control, Environmental Monitoring
Research field
Artificial intelligence, Electrical engineering
Field of Research code, Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC), 2020
Qualifications
- PhD (The University of Melbourne)
Professional memberships and associations
- Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science (FAA)
- Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (FTSE)
- Fellow of the IEEE (FIEEE)
- Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK (SFHEA)
- Member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
- Officer of the International Federation of Robotics Research (IFRR).
Teaching
- EGB439: Advanced Robotics (2013, 2016-20)
- EGB339: Introduction to Robotics (2011, 2012, 2014, 2021)
- EGB458: Advanced control (2012)
- QUT Robot Academy, open online video lessons
Experience
I have been "doing robotics" for 35 years. 25 of those years were at CSIRO working on applied R&D projects in the manufacturing, mining, asset management and agricultural domains. Some projects from my career include:
- Robots for logistics handling on a space station
- Scout vehicles for detecting weeds in pastures
- Autononomous vehicles for weed spraying in broad-acre agriculture
- Very large robotic systems for excavation in open-pit mines (automated draglines)
- Autonomous trucks for ore haulage in underground hard rock mines
- Small-scale aerial robots, including gas powered helicopters and electric quad-rotors
- Underwater robots for environmental monitoring
In the area of computer vision I have been involved in projects such as:
- Networks of cameras to monitor hand hygiene in hospitals
- Use of very wide angle cameras for robot navigation
- Very high speed stereo vision
- High-speed food sorting
- SafeTCam traffic monitoring system seen on NSW highways.
In the area of wireless sensor networks:
- Mobile sensors to monitor and control livestock
- Large scale environmental monitoring
- The combination with robotics to create mobile sensing systems
- Vision processing in sensor networks.
- Embedded operating systems, programming methodologies, in-network processing, large-scale network management, robust routing, and security.
External collaborations
- Mobile Robotics Group, Oxford University
- Distributed Robotics Lab, MIT
- IRISA/INRA, Rennes.
Research interests
- Wireless sensor networks and applications
- Robotics and sensor networks for environmental management
- Aerial robots
- Robotics; control architectures, sensor-based control
- Machine vision; stereo, algorithms, video-rate processing
- Real-time distributed computer applications.
Scientific community service
- Editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine (2009-2013)
- Founding and associate editor of the Journal of Field Robotics
- Founding multi-media editor and editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research
- Member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series
- Member of external advisory board for CONET, EU research network on cooperating objects
- Past president of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association
- Region chair, area chair, member of technical committees for major international conferences such as: ICRA, IROS, RSS, Sensys, IPSN.
Publications
- Suenderhauf, N., Dayoub, F., Hall, D., Skinner, J., Zhang, H., Carneiro, G. & Corke, P. (2019). A probabilistic challenge for object detection. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(9). https://eprints.qut.edu.au/132632
- Morrison, D., Corke, P. & Leitner, J. (2018). Closing the loop for robotic grasping: A real-time, generative grasp synthesis approach. Robotics: Science and Systems XIV, 1–10. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/121236
- Morrison, D., Tow, A., Mctaggart, M., Smith, R., Kelly - Boxall, N., Wade-Mccue, S., Erskine, J., Grinover, R., Gurman, A., Hunn, T., Lee, D., Milan, A., Pham, T., Rallos, G., Razjigaev, A., Rowntree, T., Kumar, V., Zhuang, Z., Lehnert, C., Reid, I., Corke, P. & Leitner, J. (2018). Cartman: The low-cost Cartesian manipulator that won the Amazon Robotics Challenge. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 7757–7764. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/125127
- Tsai, D., Dansereau, D., Peynot, T. & Corke, P. (2017). Image-based visual servoing with light field cameras. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2(2), 912–919. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/108559
- Mcfadyen, A., Jabeur, M. & Corke, P. (2017). Image-based visual servoing with unknown point feature correspondence. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2(2), 601–607. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/103873
- Pepperell, E., Corke, P. & Milford, M. (2016). Routed roads: Probabilistic vision-based place recognition for changing conditions, split streets and varied viewpoints. International Journal of Robotics Research, 35(9), 1057–1179. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/105665
- Lowry, S., Suenderhauf, N., Newman, P., Leonard, J., Cox, D., Corke, P. & Milford, M. (2016). Visual place recognition: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 32(1), 1–19. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/105651
- Zhang, F., Leitner, J., Milford, M., Upcroft, B. & Corke, P. (2015). Towards vision-based deep reinforcement learning for robotic motion control. Proceedings of the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation 2015, 1–8. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/92332
- Corke, P., Paul, R., Churchill, W. & Newman, P. (2013). Dealing with shadows: Capturing intrinsic scene appearance for image-based outdoor localisation. Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2085–2092. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/66363
- Mahony, R., Kumar, V. & Corke, P. (2012). Multirotor aerial vehicles: Modeling, estimation, and control of quadrotor. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 19(3), 20–32. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/77164
QUT ePrints
For more publications by Peter, explore their research in QUT ePrints (our digital repository).
Awards
- Type
- Editorial Role for an Academic Journal
- Reference year
- 2016
- Details
- Editor-in-chief of IEEE Robotics and Automation magazine 2009-13
- Type
- Fellowships
- Reference year
- 2007
- Details
- Fellow of IEEE
- Type
- Editorial Role for an Academic Journal
- Reference year
- 2006
- Details
- Founding editor and current associate editor
- Type
- Editorial Role for an Academic Journal
- Reference year
- 2004
- Details
- Member of editorial board, special responsibility for multi-media content, since 2000.
Selected research projects
- Title
- ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision (ACRV)
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- CE140100016
- Start year
- 2014
- Keywords
- Robotic Vision; Robotics; Computer Vision
- Title
- Human Cues for Robot Navigation
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP140103216
- Start year
- 2014
- Keywords
- Autonomous Robots; Mapping and Navigation; Spatial Cognition
- Title
- Robotics for zero-tillage agriculture
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- LP110200375
- Start year
- 2012
- Keywords
- Robotics; Broad Acre Agriculture; Zero Tillage; Weed Control
- Title
- Lifelong Robotic Navigation Using Visual Perception
- Primary fund type
- CAT 1 - Australian Competitive Grant
- Project ID
- DP110103006
- Start year
- 2011
- Keywords
- Robotics; Computer Vision; Visual Mapping; Visual Navigation
Projects listed above are funded by Australian Competitive Grants. Projects funded from other sources are not listed due to confidentiality agreements.
Supervision
Completed supervisions (Doctorate)
- Continuous Appearance-Based Localisation and Mapping (2014)
- Developing Grounded Representations for Robots through the Principles of Sensorimotor Coordination (2014)
- Development of Gas Sensing Technology for Ground and Airborne Applications Powered by Solar Energy: Methodology and Experimental Results (2014)
- Joint 2D and 3D Cues for Image Segmentation Towards Robotic Applications (2014)
- Shared Autonomy for Close-Quarters Navigation and Control of a VTOL Platform (2014)
- Wide-Baseline Keypoint Detection and Matching with Wide-Angle Images for Vision Based Localisation (2010)
Completed supervisions (Masters by Research)
- Design, Modelling and Measurement of Hybrid Powerplant for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (2013)
- BabelFuse Data Fusion Unit with Precision Wireless Clock Synchronisation (2012)
- Non-Invasive Method for Detecting Changes in Soil Moisture Using Wireless Sensor Network (2012)
- Statistical Modelling of Wind Effects on Signal Propagation for Wireless Sensor Networks (2011)
Supervision topics
- Submarine manipulation
- Multiple manipulator cooperation and coordination
- Mobile manipulation with logistics
- Manipulation in nature
- Off-road mobile manipulation
- Cobot contact tasks through multi-sensory deep learning
- Robotic maintenance of equipment
- Outdoor litter collection
- High-speed robotic waste separation
- Very high-speed dynamic motion planning for arm robots
- Mapping the world: understanding the environment through spatio-temporal implicit representations
The supervisions listed above are only a selection.