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 494 matching student topics
Displaying 157–168 of 494 results
Mobile manipulation with logistics
Mobile manipulators have been proven helpful for individual manipulation tasks but slow for larger-scale logistical tasks. This project investigates how several robots (mobile manipulators and mobile robots) can cooperate to complete a task efficiently (this could be considered a travelling salesman problem with moving depots).Agriculture: The mobile manipulator picks the produce while the mobile robots transfer to produce between collection points.Clean up Australia Day 2019: Collecting rubbish from natural environments. Mobile manipulators collect rubbish and transfer it to mobile robots, …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Manipulation in nature
Grasping/manipulating in rainforest, farmland or shrubland environments pose a new challenge for existing techniques. This project will investigate how they manipulate where there may be tree branches, foliage, or other natural obstacles in the way.This project would explore existing and emerging techniques such as optimisation, neural radiance fields (NeRFs), deep learning and reinforcement learning and equipment, including depth cameras, LiDAR, event cameras, and light field cameras.Does the manipulator have to re-arrange the environment to manipulate the point of interest?Or does …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Off-road mobile manipulation
This project will investigate how mobile manipulators can operate and interact in natural environments like rainforests, grassland, shrubland, farmland, or desert ecosystems. This research project would explore how to control a continuous track or quadruped mobile manipulator in outdoor natural environments with many obstacles and constraints.Is holistic mobile manipulation possible with uneven terrain? As a mobile robot traverses rough ground, the terrain difference will cause feedback in the end-effector position.The mobile manipulator must overcome obstacle challenges, i.e. traverse around a …
- 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
Identifying Indigenous contributions to knowledge
The Australian Census collects data every ten years to reflect who we are as a nation. But the data collected by the Census only tells part of our story.Indigenous people lived in Australia for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers, accumulating a wealth of knowledge about Australia's land, climate, flora and fauna. Researchers have only begun tapping this knowledge as the basis for modern scientific research.This project will combine machine learning and text-analytics tools to develop a …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
The effects of trust on government operations
For a government to operate efficiently, the trust of its constituents, as well as the global community, is considered to be of substantial importance. A lack of trust could impair the government’s ability to effectively manage and fund its operations from collecting taxes and external investment. However, further research is required to understand the underlying trust mechanisms and their influence on governments’ performance. To address this research gap, the project will examine how trust in government is determined, evaluate how …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Accountancy
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Future Enterprise
Continuous time samplers (MCMC at the limit!)
The goal of this project is to develop new continuous time Monte Carlo methods for efficient sampling from high-dimensional distributions. Continuous-time Monte Carlo methods are a class of algorithms that use continuous-time dynamics to generate samples from target distributions, rather than the discrete-time dynamics used in traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. These methods have been shown to have faster mixing and better exploration of the state space, making them particularly appealing samplers for challenging distributions.The main objectives of …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
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