Student topics

Much like driving cars on our roads, there are rules around driving maritime systems (boats) on waterways regarding where you can drive and how to avoid and behave in potential collision situations.In this project, you'll explore and develop state-of-the-art perception and decision support solutions to allow robotic surface vessels (robot boats) to safely travel complex waterways in and around other human-driven vessels. This will involve diving deep into vision and laser-based sensor processing and fusion algorithms, as well as robust …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

This PhD aims to investigate methods for enabling robots to intelligently move their perception systems to improve their view of a target object. Typically, robots capture images of their environment and then decide how to act: grasping an item, move to a location etc... However, sometimes it is necessary for a robot to gather more information in order to make a better decision. How can a robot decide on where to move its sensors (i.e. camera) such that it learns …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Reaching into cluttered and unstructured environments for robotic manipulation is still a largely unsolved problem. Current motion planning strategies for robots optimise for reaching while avoiding collisions within their environment. This is a fundamental problem when interacting with real-world environments as contact is inevitable. This PhD seeks to understand how we can use tactile or other sensory feedback and advanced control methods to exploit the environment for solving robotic tasks that are not achievable with current techniques. This PhD aims …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

The aim of this PhD is to develop an autonomous multirotor based aerial manipulator that is capable of searching an environment, visually identifying a payload, and performing a pick and-place type maneuver. Full 3D trajectories for the search stage of the flight need to be predefined, with the grasping maneuver generated dynamically once the payload is identified. The manipulator and payload interactions with the multirotor base need to be actively compensated for by the controller to ensure stable flight during …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles face a wide range of challenges in identifying and safely traversing terrain across a wide range of environments from mine sites to farms to forests to deserts. We are looking for PhD students interested in developing new techniques for improving terrain traversability detection, using both "traditional" methods as well as modern deep learning-based pipelines. …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Multiple manipulators or manipulators and mobile manipulators share a workspace and/or workpiece. How do these robots coexist safely while also completing tasks quickly?Multiple robots assembling a part in a shared workspace.Multiple robots cooperatively assemble a part in a shared workspace.Mobile manipulators and manipulators cooperatively manipulating: a mobile manipulator collects a bottle and brings it to be opened by a manipulator before delivering the bottle.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

This project will explore and develop techniques for control and vision in submarines to allow for robust and effective manipulation capabilities - autonomous control of an underwater mobile manipulator in the presence of current and reactionary forces.Underwater maintenance: A submarine mobile manipulator can carry out underwater maintenance and monitoring, for example, dam wall maintenance or ship hull cleaning.Coral reef: A submarine mobile manipulator which can collect samples, remove rubbish, remove invasive species, and/or monitor.Alternatively, these same underlying ideas could be …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Despite efforts to monitor and manage declining species and ecosystems around the world, biodiversity is still not routinely included in mainstream decision-making and continues to decline at the highest rate in human history. Added to this is the problem that both natural and agri-food systems are continually changing due to human and natural disturbances, with climate change likely to increase the impacts of extreme events like drought, fire and economic shocks. Because of large uncertainties and trade-offs between many human …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Biology and Environmental Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Centre for the Environment

As airway infections become pandemic worldwide, airway models to investigate pathogen infection mechanism and nasal drug delivery is now increasingly important. However, current airway models cannot mimic the triad coupling of human nasal anatomical geometries, aerosol flow and biological responses (e.g. infection and inflammation) from the nasal epithelium.Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models are used for simulating pathological airflow patterns resulting from anatomical structural changes of the nasal cavities, but they cannot measure phenotypic or functional alterations in the nasal epithelium …

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

The future of fashion consumption is changing rapidly. A new digital fashion economy is emerging at the intersection of fashion, law and social change.Incumbent fashion houses are now staking their territorial claims in the digital realm.At the same time, traditional markets for fashion have failed, and manufacturing has been largely offshored, while consumers are increasingly more informed about the impact of fashion consumption.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

School

School of Design

Research centre(s)

Design Lab

Optical limiting uses a medium’s nonlinear response to allow light at low intensities to be transmitted, but restricts transmission at high intensities so as to safeguard sensitive detectors including the eye. A popular nonlinear process used in optical limiters is two photon absorption where two high intensity light photons are simultaneously absorbed thereby reducing the light transmission through the medium. Unfortunately, in gold nanoparticle optical limiters a second nonlinear process can arise – saturated absorption which leads to an increase …

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Chemistry and Physics

Research centre(s)

Centre for Materials Science

This research is part of a Future Fellowship project funded by the Australian Research Council. You will join a team of researchers and research students in the school of computer science, with expertise in the disciplines of human computer interactions and data science.In broad terms, the project is seeking to understand how the meaning of images can be computed and used in the design of intelligent interfaces which can be used by and support people with intellectual disability.The visual interactions …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science