QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 462 matching student topics
Displaying 133–144 of 462 results
Making seen what we can’t feel – wearable suns sensors for UV protection
Radiation exposure can be damaging, but at the right dose it can also have health benefits. An example, while ultraviolet (UV) light can cause skin damage and melanoma, it is also necessary for Vitamin D production. The key is knowing what dose we are receiving and when we have had too much. In this collaborative project with the School of Design, we are developing new wearable sun sensors that are sensitive to UV radiation, but also fashionable and desirable to …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Microfluidic chip-based tumor-immune cancer models for biomarker discovery
In-vitro profiling of tumour-immune cell interactions in proximity can provide valuable insight into patient response to new combinatorial immunotherapies that are in the pipeline and currently being tested in clinical trials. These in-vitro models allow for a more controlled and isolated environment and provide a methodical approach for generating quantifiable data characterizing the interactions between target and effector cells. Traditionally executed in well-plates, tumour-immune models have been slowly moving towards a microfluidic chip-based approach for several reasons: better control over …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Reversing Epithelial Mesenchymal Plasticity with Eribulin to Enhance Therapy Response
Epithelial mesenchymal plasticity (EMP) is a highly regulated and powerful cellular process that is fundamental in embryonic development (1), which is hijacked by cancer cells for metastatic progression and therapy resistance in epithelial cancers (2). Eribulin is a microtubule-inhibiting cancer drug discovered in sea sponges and approved for 3rd line therapy in metastatic breast cancer, which was shown to reverse epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) (3).We hypothesise that eribulin’s reversal of EMT will sensitise breast cancer cells to other therapies and …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Robust feature selection and correspondence for visual control of robots
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
Safe autonomous driving through dense vegetation via advanced perception
One of the remaining challenges to achieve off-road autonomous navigation for mobile robots is the accurate evaluation of vegetated environments, to determine where a robot can safely drive through. To achieve this, robots may use extra sensory modalities compared to humans, such as RADARs that can penetrate through vegetation and see behind it what is not visible to the naked eye. Another option is to physically interact with the environment to 'clear the way'.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Cobot contact tasks through multi-sensory deep learning
Contact tasks like grinding, polishing and assembly require a robot to physically interact with both rigid and flexible objects. Current methods relying on force control have difficulty achieving consistent finishing results and lack robustness in dealing with non-linear dynamics inherent in how the material is handled. This project will take a new approach that detects and diagnoses the dynamical process through deep learning fusion of multi-sensory data, including force/tactile, visual, thermal, sound, and acoustic emission; and generate corrective process parameters …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Robotic maintenance of equipment
Think about the problem of maintaining equipment at remote work sites. How can robotic technology help human maintenance staff to work more safely and productively?
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Outdoor litter collection
Cleanup Australia day in 2019 collected 17,000 ute loads of rubbish from rivers, parks, beaches, roadways and bushland. Imagine a robot ground vehicle or boat that could identify litter, plan the motion of the robot so that it can pick up items in the right sequence so that it doesn't have to stop, while also navigating obstacles in the environment. This is a challenging problem in perception, dynamic path planning and control.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
High-speed robotic waste separation
Sorting waste or recyclables is an important but unpleasant job, currently done by specialised machinery and humans for the hard bits. What are the core challenges that could be done by "robots that see". This is a challenging problem in perception, dynamic path planning and control.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Very high-speed dynamic motion planning for arm robots
Robot manipulator arms are increasingly used for logistics applications. These typically require robots to run at the limits of their performance: motor torque and motor velocity. Added challenges include significant payloads (if we are schlepping heavy parcels) with apriori unknown mass, the possibility of boxes detaching from the gripper under high acceleration, and fixed obstacles in the workspace. How can we determine the limits to performance, quickly identify the payload mass, then plan the fastest path to get from A to B.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Implicit representations for place recognition and robot localisation
This project will develop a novel localization pipeline based on implicit map representations. Unlike traditional approaches that use explicit representations like point clouds or voxel grids, the map in our project is represented implicitly in the weights of neural networks such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). You will get a chance to develop a new class of localization algorithms that work directly on the implicit representation, bypassing the costly rendering step from implicit to explicit representation. The designed algorithms will …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Space robotics: Scene understanding for Lunar/Mars Rover
The QUT Centre for Robotics is working with the Australian Space Agency on the newly established Australian space program, in which robots will play a key role. There are multiple PhD projects available to work on different aspect of developing a new Lunar Rover (and later Mars Rover) and in particular its intelligence and autonomy. Future rovers will not only need to conduct exploration and science missions as famous rovers such as NASA's Curiosity or Perseverance are doing right now …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
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