Category: News

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. 

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 seasoned 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 engaging panel discussions and workshops: Understanding Research Impact, Post-PhD Pathways, Collaboration and Networking Workshop, and Strategic Research Development Workshop. With insights from top institutions and industry leaders, the day was a powerful reminder to never stop learning. 

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 dynamic discussions, explored cutting-edge research, and contributed to shaping the future of robotics by narrowing the gap between real-world applications and cutting edge research. 

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.

Congratulations to ARIAM Chief Investigator, Dr. Donald Dansereau on the successful award of a NVIDIA Academic Grant to support his research project on Physics-Based Simulation for Robotic Vision in Extreme Environments. This research explores the use of physics-based simulations to design advanced imaging systems for robotic vision in extreme environments such as space and underwater. By leveraging NVIDIA‘s cutting-edge ray-tracing and deep learning platforms, the project aims to develop new kinds of sensors for challenging tasks like satellite inspection and underwater mapping. This innovative work has the potential to enhance robotic performance in critical applications, including infrastructure monitoring and environmental conservation.

The ELO₂ Consortium—co-led by EPE Oceania and Lunar Outpost Oceania—has been selected by the Australian Space Agency to build Australia’s first lunar rover, nicknamed “Roo-ver.” This $42 million national project will harness the innovation and expertise of universities, SMEs, and industry partners from every corner of Australia to design, manufacture, and operate the rover right here at home.

ARIAM CI’s Ian Manchester, Salah Sukkarieh, Thierry Peynot, Niko Sünderhauf and Dimity Miller are all involved and will be contributing advanced robotics technologies to this mission. This milestone showcases Australian ingenuity on the global stage, sparks new jobs and research opportunities in the growing space industry, and strengthens our contribution to NASA’s Artemis Program, with “Roo-ver” set to be remotely operated on the Moon from Australia. Stay tuned as we embark on this once-in-a-lifetime mission to put an Aussie-made rover on the lunar surface and usher in a new era of national space leadership!

We are delighted to announce a significant new partnership for the ARIAM Research Hub!

In an extensive multi-year collaboration led by Prof. Salah Sukkarieh, ARIAM will join forces with roboticists, AI experts, and plant breeders from Rijk Zwaan to revolutionize crop breeding operations. This partnership will leverage cutting-edge robotics, advanced sensing, and digital twin technologies.

Rijk Zwaan, a global leader in vegetable breeding, is a family-owned company renowned for its innovation and research excellence. With over 4,000 employees, Rijk Zwaan dedicates 30% of its annual revenue to R&D, driving global advancements in agriculture. This collaboration is a fusion of innovative research, technical expertise, and practical application. By bridging the gap between academia and industry, we aim to deliver
impactful agricultural robotic and AI solutions. Our goal is to enhance crop breeding efficiency, improve sustainability, and address future food production challenges.

We believe that Rijk Zwaan will be a fantastic addition to the ARIAM partner cohort and there are strong research synergies with current projects that we look forward to exploring further.

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.