Human Cues for Robot Navigation @ EECS School, QUT, affiliated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision, 2014-present
As we navigate around the world, we rely on a large number of cues to guide us. In built environments, such as shopping centres, hospitals, and university campuses, there are sign posts, maps, and other cues that we use unconsciously. As humans we are experts at using this information to get where we need to go. Robots, on the other hand, can use laser sensors and cameras to build excellent maps of environments that they can use later for navigation, as long as nothing has changed.
Our team is developing a robotic system able to navigate through a built environment using the types of cues that humans use. The project will culminate in a navigational Turing test, comparing how well our system and human participants can perform at navigational tasks across an unfamiliar university campus. This project seeks to develop robots that can navigate quickly and accurately to remote locations by accessing and reasoning about information in their world and online.
Lingodroids @ School of ITEE, UQ, 2005-2012
In the future the natural way to communicate with robots will be through human language. Language is constantly updating with new words and new meanings for existing words. Rather than pre-programming a language into a robot, it would be ideal for them to be able to learn and adapt their language use themselves. The Lingodroids are language learning robots that invent their own language. They are mobile robots that explore their world, building personal maps, and communicating with each other about places, relationships between places based on distance and direction, and temporal concepts. The robots have used the shared language resulting from their interactions to successfully specify meeting places and times.
The overall aim for the Lingodroids project is to develop robots that can communicate meaningfully and effectively with humans as well as other robots. The Lingodroids have developed their own proto-language as part of realising this ambition. This research takes us one step closer to robots that are more useful to humans in domestic situations, and having a robot in your home that you can interact with naturally.
Museum Telepresence Robot @ ICT Centre, CSIRO, 2013