Category: News

We were pleased to have the opportunity to meet Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sydney, Professor Mark Scott, on Thursday, 23 October.

As part of a tour of the Australian Centre for Robotics (ACFR), the ARIAM team had the opportunity to share their innovative research and showcase the leading-edge projects that are helping shape the future of robotics.

The short demonstrations conducted by our researchers illustrated how our work, including on land, underwater, and in the air, is helping develop sophisticated solutions to global challenges.

🤖💡 Robotic Navigation in Unstructured Environments 

We are proud to celebrate the success of our chief investigators, Dr Donald Dansereau, Prof Stefan Williams and, A/Prof Thierry Peynot in the latest Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project Round! 👏 

Led by Prof Teresa Vidal Calleja, Prof Nico Pietroni, Dr Donald Dansereau, Prof Stefan Williams, and A/Prof Thierry Peynot, this project will develop the theory and algorithms to sense and estimate dynamic conditions, allowing for autonomous systems to respond to challenges like crowds or fire spread, in environments that are unknown, unstructured, and dynamic.  

The project will lead to a new paradigm in robotic navigation by producing the next generation of autonomous systems in the field, the outcome of which could result in better mitigation of life-threatening situations.  

Congratulations to all involved 👏 

💰 Funding: $686,776 

On Friday 15 October, researchers from ARIAM had the opportunity to visit our partner, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), for a guided tour by the ANSTO Discovery Centre.  

The visit offered an in depth look into the world of nuclear science and the diverse work ANSTO undertakes across various sectors such as health, environmental research, and industry solutions.  

Highlights included a tour of the OPAL reactor, Australia’s only active nuclear reactor, operated by ANSTO, which is used to irradiate samples of medical and industrial applications such as semiconductor manufacturing.  

The team was also introduced to the Neutron Image Centre by Prof. Anna Paradowska, who shared details of her work in this area and insight into future developments in the field. The Molybdenum-99 manufacturing facilities, which provides radioisotope generators to more than 250 hospitals around Australia and New Zealand, was next in the tour. The team gained valuable insight into how nuclear medicine is handled and how robotics could be utilised in the future, given the challenges involved in the field. Several members of the ANSTO nuclear medicine team also discussed their work, organisation’s history, and how ANSTO is incorporating automation and robotics to improve safety and productivity in their nuclear medicine manufacturing.  

The ARIAM team also visited ANSTO’s Australian Synchrotron facilities, which operate particle accelerators to study fundamental physics, along with studying real world applications like the effect of radiation on electronics within the satellites and instruments in space. Here, the team was able to get up close to the accelerator itself and follow the life cycle of a particle in the accelerator. 

After a morning packed with knowledge sharing, the visit concluded at the ANSTO cafe for lunch. Whilst the tour was informative, according to one ARIAM researcher the “full-sized beef enchilada for $9 in this economy was enough to be a memorable experience in itself”.  

We thank the ANSTO team for welcoming us and offering our researchers the opportunity to explore their world class facilities and gain insight into the work and research conducted at ANSTO.  

🤖💡 🏰 

Two robots, one historic courtyard, and a mission to map the future.  

On July 29, the ARIAM Hub Demonstrator Program Brought Boston Dynamics’ Spot and ACFR’s Groundhog together for a collaborative tech trial in the iconic USyd Quadrangle.  

📋 What We Set Out to Achieve 

The primary goal? Demonstrate multi-platform robotic coordination and imaging capability. The team focused on: 

• Practice dual platform operations, determine any unforeseen complexities and safety issues   

• Training operators with hands-on driving sessions 

• Test operations of Spot Payload, especially mobility and dynamics changes. Test stair climbing and descent   

• Collecting imaging data to reconstruct the Quad using Spot’s CAM/IR payload 

🧠 What’s Next
The data collected will be used to develop enhanced digital representations and inform future robotic demonstrations. The team also gained valuable insights into skill and tool gaps, paving the way for targeted training and resource planning. 

The ARIAM team continues to with collaborative trials that merge engineering, imaging, and community connection. 

From 1-4 July, the QUT Gardens Point Campus in Brisbane came alive with the second Australian School of Robotic Systems (AUSROS 2025). The school welcomed participants from top universities and industry partners across Australia for four days of immersive learning, collaboration, and technical exploration in the field of robotics. 

Designed to empower graduate students, early-career researchers, and professional engineers, the program offered a comprehensive overview of robotic systems. 

Program Highlights 

Foundational Lectures
Presented by leading academics and researchers, these sessions introduced core elements of robotic systems including: 

• Control & Estimation – Presented by Prof. Ian Manchester

• Planning & Reasoning – Presented by A/Prof. Jen Jen Chung, Prof. Hanna Kurniawati, and Dr Rahul Shome 

• Sensing & Perception – Presented by A/Prof. Thierry Peynot, Dr Donald Dansereau, and Prof. Will Browne

• Robotic Learning – Presented by Dr Feras Dayoub, and Dr Peyman Moghadam

The program was further complemented by systems and science deep dive talks that covered state-of-the-art domain of interest, drawing on the technical depth of specific topic 

Each day featured sessions that brought together experts from academia and industry to explore pressing questions in robotic systems, sparking lively debate and collaborative momentum across disciplines.  

A standout moment was the trip to CSIRO Robotics that included a Robotics tour and workshop, allowing attendees hands on learning.   

Thank you to all speakers, attendees, organisers, and partner institutions for making AuSRoS 2025 a success. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to building on this momentum as we continue advancing the robotics community in Australia and beyond. 

In June, over 10,000 computer vision experts from around the world gathered in Nashville Tennessee for 2025 IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR 2025). Representing QUT Centre for Robotics, ARIAM Research Hub, Australian Centre for Robotics, and Abyss Solutions Ltd, Chamuditha Jayanga presented his paper ‘Multi-View Pose-Agnostic Change Localization with Zero Labels’. Co-authored with Jason Lai, Donald Dansereau, Niko Sünderhauf, and senior lead Dimity Miller, the work introduces a powerful new method for detecting scene changes—without labels or fixed camera poses.  

Chamuditha and the team present a novel label-free, pose-agnostic method for detecting scene changes using multi-view 3D Gaussian Splatting, outperforming existing approaches and enabling accurate change localisation from as few as five images – even at unseen viewpoints – alongside releasing a new real-world benchmark dataset.  

Check out the paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.03911

The ARIAM Research Hub proudly hosted a workshop on 19th May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, held in Atlanta, Georgia. Centred around Open Challenges in Robotics for Asset Inspection and Management (OCRAIM), the workshop brought together leading researchers, industry professionals, and innovators to address the pressing challenges in robotic inspection and asset management. 

As one of the world’s premier robotics conferences, ICRA 2025 provided an ideal platform for sharing insights and fostering collaboration. The ARIAM led workshop focused on the technical and operational hurdles faced by industry professionals and also highlighted cutting-edge research which is at the forefront of addressing these challenges.  

Attendees engaged in robust discussions and explored the latest advancements in this exciting field.

The ARIAM Research Hub hosted our Researcher Development Workshop on May 9th for the research cohort within ARIAM Research Hub and the Australian Centre for Robotics (ACFR). The event brough together experts from across Australia’s robotics and tech community to inspire and equip the next generation of academic researchers and industry leaders.

Co-organised by Donald Dansereau, Gideon Billings, and the ARIAM Management Team, the day featured two standout keynotes:

• Samson Lee (Visionary Machines) shared his entrepreneurial journey from PhD student to startup founder—complete with a 16-camera rigged family car.
• Dana Kulic (Monash University) delivered a keynote titled “A Serendipitous Sequence of Meeting Amazing People Who Let Me Hang Out With Them and Opened Doors I Never Knew Existed.”  Her global career journey highlighted the power of mentorship and the courage to seize unexpected opportunities. 

The day included four panel discussions and workshops including Understanding Research Impact, Post-PhD Pathways, Collaboration and Networking Workshop, and a strategic research development workshop. With insights from ARIAM academics as well as guests from Monash, UTS and industry leaders from amongst our partners and CSIRO. The day was a powerful reminder to never stop learning!

On the back of their recent win of the Boston Dynamics SPOT robot, we interviewed PhD researchers Michael Somerfield and Bina Rajan about their plans for the quadruple robot, including how they will modify its capabilities to enhance their workflows.

Michael: My research is directly in the field of Legged Robotics, so the spot allows me to test my research on a world-class platform.

Bina: My work is oriented around understanding the behaviour of camera blur on moving platforms. it would be interesting to understand this behaviour on a quadrupedal platform like spot.

What tasks or experiments do you envision Spot performing in your research?

At the end of 2024, ARIAM PhD researchers Michael Somerfield and Bina Rajan created the winning submission to the SafetyCulture Innovation Challenge. The competition invited university students and professional engineers to unleash their inner innovator for a chance to win a share of $5,000 in prizes, plus a Boston Dynamics Spot robot. Using the decommissioned Cape Don lighthouse vessel as a backdrop, Michael and Bina’s submission demonstrated an innovative idea for how Spot could revolutionise shipping inspection; boosting efficiency, safety, and productivity in a work environment. On March 19, the SafetyCulture team invited the winners to collect the robot in person and to tour their amazing offices in Surry Hills.

As the first off the shelf quadrupedal platform our Hub has acquired, our researchers plan to combine and utilise various sensor suites to test multi-modal data collection techniques for inspection, SLAM, 3d image reconstructions and many other ideas yet to be discovered.