We won Best Student Paper at ACRA 2011!

December 11, 2011 in Award, Paper, Research with 0 Comments

By “we” I mean my hard working students Winston and Nalika. Good work you two :)  

Winston Yii receiving the best student paper prize from ARAA president Rob Mahony

 

Visual Localisation of a Robot with an external RGBD Sensor

Authors: Winston M. S. Yii, Nalika Damayanthi, Tom Drummond and Wai Ho Li

 

Aside:

It was a true pleasure attending ACRA (Program Chairing was more hectic and formative). It was filled with interesting technical presentations. I also had a lot of insightful (or just plain entertaining) conversations with fellow roboticists during the BBQ and Banquet.

Photos to come soon.

Photos are HERE (thanks to Dennis Lui from Monash) and HERE (thanks to Michael Milford from QUT).

 

ACRA 2011

December 6, 2011 in Paper, Research with 0 Comments

Going to attend ACRA 2011 starting Wednesday 7th of December. I am Program Chair at this Australasian Robotics and Automation conference (full program here). Despite long hours preparing for the conference with my co-chairs (Tom Drummond, Lindsay Kleeman and Andrew R. Russell), I am really looking forward to the technical presentations.

I have 3 papers at this conference. It was great working (in to the wee hours) with so many motivated students and academics.

 

A lightweight approach to 6-DOF plane-based egomotion estimation using inverse depth 

Authors: Titus Jia Jie Tang, Wen Lik Dennis Lui and Wai Ho Li

 

Visual Localisation of a Robot with an external RGBD Sensor 

Authors: Winston M. S. Yii, Nalika Damayanthi, Tom Drummond and Wai Ho Li

 

eBug – An Open Robotics Platform for Teaching and Research 

Authors: Nicholas D’Ademo, Wen Lik Dennis Lui, Wai Ho Li, Y. Ahmet Sekercioglu and Tom Drummond

 

ISMAR 2011

November 1, 2011 in Conferences, Paper, Research with 0 Comments

Just got back from ISMAR 2011 in Basel, Switzerland where I presented and demonstrated Transformative Reality (TR). TR applies computer vision and robotic sensing in real time to optimise the usefulness of visual information presented through low resolution displays such as bionic vision from implanted visual prostheses.

Here’s the POSTER and technical PAPER.

Videos

 

Photos from live demo (courtesy of ISMAR website)

ECE3091 Engineering Design

September 28, 2011 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

I coordinated and lectured ECE3091 Engineering Design at Monash university during semester 2. The unit required teams of 3 students to design, build and test autonomous robots aimed at one-versus-one competition. More details available from the Unit Wiki.

The short video below shows a few of the robots that the students came up with after much agile engineering and numerous tests.

The unit was very well received, receiving good student evaluations and comments as well as drawing a large number of onlookers for the robot contests. All teams were able to produce a robot that could move autonomously, deal with obstacles and flip foam pucks  intelligently to a pre-designated team colour of red or blue (goal of the contest).

CARPI 2010

October 8, 2010 in Uncategorized with 0 Comments

I attended CARPI 2010 to present work done in collaboration with Sp AusNet (Power utility in Australia) dealing with the detection of objects and defects on electrical transmission lines. Highlights included

  • Presenting the PAPER
  • Met and played pool against robotics legend Shigeo Hirose
  • Blown away by Hirose’s epic keynote (40+ slides of different robot design including numerous videos)
  • Chaired image processing session
  • Saw a lot of robots at IREQ (Hydro-Quebec’s robotics research lab)

Here’s a few photos: