Student topics

Concentrating solar power (CSP) is a technology that utilises mirrors (heliostats) to focus the sun’s rays on a solar receiver. This provides heat for a power generation cycle, creating thermal energy.Control of the heat transfer fluid temperature in the solar receiver is crucial for the efficient use/storage of thermal energy and to minimise the degradation of the receiver. The aim of this project is to design controllers for the heat transfer fluid pumps and the heliostats using a previously developed model of the receiver's thermodynamics.

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

This project explores buildings, public/civic spaces, and landscapes as water infrastructure. Water is integral to human survival; hence understanding buildings and urban spaces as habitable water infrastructure has the potential to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis and navigate too much water (floods) and too little water (drought) while offering different modes of occupation.With increasing rainfall intensities, floods, rising sea levels, and drought, the pervasive dichotomy between habitable spaces and water infrastructures can no longer hold. The two can't …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Architecture and Built Environment

Managing multiple robotic systems simultaneously poses many challenges around coordination and control. This is particularly true in environments where there's a lack of accurate localisation, sensing uncertainty and limited communications, yet there is an overarching mission objective or series of tasks that need to be completed.In this project, you will explore and develop approaches around multi-robot swarming and coordinated formation control for dynamic process monitoring, target tracking and coordinated mapping. There will be a particular focus on underwater and surface …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Stable correspondence-free image-based visual servoing is a challenging and important problem.In classical image-based visual controllers, explicit feature correspondence (matching) to some desired arrangement (configuration) is required before a control input is obtained. Instead, this project will investigate variable feature correspondence and robust feature selection to simultaneously solve visual servoing problem, removing any feature tracking requirement or additional image processing.Also involving Prof Jason Ford.Example of recent past work

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) describes a set of systems, services and procedures that will be developed to manage drone (unmanned aircraft systems/unmanned aerial vehicle/remotely piloted aircraft) operations in and around our cities. From surveillance tasks and package delivery through to passenger transport, UTM will be essentially in ensuring safe and efficient use of our airspace. Essentially, UTM is a new air traffic control system for drones with high levels of automation and advanced decision making and control. This research aims …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

The aim of this research is to develop a framework for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), that balances information sharing, exploration, localization, mapping, and other planning objectives thus allowing a team of UAVs to navigate in complex environments in time critical situations. This project expects to generate new knowledge in UAV navigation using an innovative approach by combining Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms with Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) and Deep Reinforcement learning. This should provide significant benefits, …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

This PhD project aims to develop a framework for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which optimally balances localisation, mapping and other objectives in order to solve sequential decision tasks under map and pose uncertainty. This project expects to generate new knowledge in UAV navigation using an innovative approach by combining simultaneous localisation and mapping algorithms with partially observable markov decision processes. The project’s expected outcomes will enable UAVs to solve multiple objectives under map and pose uncertainty in GPS-denied environments. This …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Future robotics systems are likely to benefit from having an ability to self-diagnose self-failure or the presence of anomalous situations (so that they can switch to fallback or fail-safe modes). Example situations include subtle sensor or actuator failure and cyber security or physical intruder detection.Such low signal-to-noise anomaly detection or self-diagnose problems can be understood using powerful mathematical and statistical tools which QCR has a rich history of advancing through collaboration with industry partners and publication in premium international venues.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Microfluidic devices (MFD) are extensively used in microbial studies. Bacterial cell attachment onto surfaces under flow conditions in laminar regime has been previously studied using a custom designed MFD.As an extension of this study, microbial attachment under turbulent flow is to be studied in a future project. The suitability of current MFD for microbial studies under turbulent flow must be evaluated to adopt / redesign the MFD.A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis is proposed to examine the fluid flow inside …

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

Many critical infrastructure systems are operated using networked feedback control. These systems crucially use wireless networks to transmit sensor and actuation signals. Unfortunately, wireless technology (sensors, actuators and communications) is unreliable and increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks. This causes performance degradation, loss of stability, system failure and, at worst, leads to deaths and disasters. Therefore, mitigating the effects of attack algorithms on Cyberphysical Systems (CPSs) is of utmost importance.A distinguishing aspect, when compared to attacks on classical information systems, is that …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Videos of sport activities are widely available at large scales. AI and its sub-fields, especially computer vision and machine learning, have a great potential to analyse, understand and extract useful information from these videos.This project aims at using AI and its subfields in computer vision and machine learning to develop techniques for analysing sport videos to extract intelligence for players and coaches.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

The missing data problem is often unavoidable for real-world data collection systems because of a variety of factors, such as sensor malfunctioning, maintenance work, transmission errors, and so on. Filling in missing information in a dataset is an important requirement for many machine-learning algorithms that require a complete dataset as input. Data imputation algorithms aim at filling the missing information in a dataset. Many missing data imputation techniques exist in the literature, with applications demonstrated on various types of datasets. …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science