Month: November 2024

Congratulations to Prof. Stefan Williams, Associate Prof. Thierry Peynot and Dr. Donald Dansereau on the award of their Australian Research Council Discovery Project: Introspection for Resilient Robotic Perception in Challenging Environments.

Their project aims to enhance robotic perception in challenging environments such as murky water and extreme weather where state-of-the-art approaches fail. By developing new representations and processing architectures capable of introspection, it enables robots to recognise and adapt to their own perceptual limitations.

The expected outcomes are robotic systems with unprecedented resilience in challenging application domains like infrastructure monitoring and autonomous driving. This should bring economic benefit to Australia with broad robotic deployments in environmental monitoring and understanding of critical marine and terrestrial ecosystems, parks, and infrastructure, and improved mobility for the elderly and disabled.

To round up the year, we hosted our first Annual Conference and Research Showcase at the University of Sydney’s Business School, on November 25^th. The day was a great success and provided our research team with the opportunity to present their research projects, via lightning talks and poster presentations and discuss their opportunities as well as challenges. We hope that this event will help foster broader collaboration across the Hub.

The conference was opened by Prof. Julie Cairney, Interim DVCR at the University of Sydney and ARIAM Board Member.  A special thanks to Dr. Michael Bewley, VP of AI & Computer Vision – Nearmap, for an inspiring presentation on the evolution of AI at Nearmap. Our Director, Prof. Ian Manchester, shared key achievements and highlights for 2024, Prof. Niko Sünderhauf introduced us to exciting innovations in robotics research, and Prof. Stefan Williams facilitated a strategy session to co-design the next set of projects in our collaborative demonstrator program.

The event was a wonderful way to end an exciting year of research collaboration and to celebrate our collective achievements. We look forward to more opportunities to come together as a team, including our partners and key stakeholders, in 2025.