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A monthly newsletter by the QUT Centre for Robotics
October 2021 Table of Contents

Directors Message
Newsletter Information
Centre News & Achievements
HDR Internship News
Past Events
Robotics Seminar Series Catch up
Regular Events
Behind the Scenes
HDR Internship Opportunities
Competition & Awards
Collaborations, Grants & Projects
Publication Highlights

Directors Message

Welcome to newsletter number 2.  It was my ambition since QCR started to have internal and external newsletters, and both of these are now off and running.  See the article below for information about our external newsletter.

The QUT Centre survey saw our Centre receive a very high score as well as a number of very positive comments about the way the Centre operates, and a few areas for improvement. Last week we had one of the regular Centre management committee meetings, with Firuz (head of school) and Ana (FoE Dean).  That committee is clearly very happy with our Centre, there was great discussion, and some further actions.  The job of the Centre exec (Michael, Jason, Niko, Peter and Ilana) and the Centre’s portfolio leads (all the other CIs) is to continually refine the way we operate for the benefit of all while adapting to changes in the broad environment we operate in.  Feel free to contact any of the exec at any time about any concerns you might have, or improvements you think we could make.  

The rest of the newsletter shows, again, the breadth and quality of your collective achievement.

Enjoy the issue.

Peter

Newsletter Information

External Newsletter 

Every quarter we are sending a newsletter to external contacts as a way of building our profile and engagement with industry and government.  If you’d like to know what we are saying about you (and the Centre) you can view that newsletter here: https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy/Newsletters+Archive 

You are welcome to sign up yourself if you like, there is a signup link in the newsletter.  If you have contacts you would like to share this with, please forward the link and invite them to signup as well. 

Link to sign up http://eepurl.com/hIKu8z 
 

Internal Newsletter archive 

We might be getting ahead ourselves since this is only edition 2, but we have created an archive of newsletters on the Wiki.  You can find it here:  https://wiki.qut.edu.au/display/cyphy/Newsletters+Archive 

Centre News & Achievements

CSIRO/DATA61 + Emesent DARPA 2nd Place 

PhD student Brendan Tidd was recently part of Team CSIRO Data61 who placed second in the US Government research agency DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge. See more on this here

CRC Association’s 2020 Award presented to Urban Art Projects, Queensland University of Technology and RMIT University. 

Innovative Manufacturing CRC (IMCRC) congratulates its ‘Design Robotics for Mass Customisation’ team on winning the Cooperative Research Centre Association’s 2020 Award for Excellence in Innovation.  Presented at this year’s Cooperative Research Australia (CRA) Collaborate Innovate 2021 conference, the award recognises outstanding examples of research collaboration that address industry-specific problems for the benefit of Australian industry and the economy.  With funding from IMCRC, in 2017, Brisbane-based design and manufacturing company Urban Art Projects (UAP) embarked on an $8 million design robotics research project in partnership with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and RMIT University (RMIT).  QUT Associate Professor Jared Donovan, who accepted the award on behalf of the Design Robotics team, thanked all participants for their contributions to the project. 

Sourav Garg had a paper accepted to CoRL2021 as an oral (6.5% acceptance rate): SeqMatchNet: Contrastive Learning with Sequence Matching for Place Recognition & Relocalisation.

Congratulations to Dr Justin Matthew Kenny for being awarded his PhD for his research, “Wave-Induced Marine Craft Motion Estimation and Control”.
 

Congratulations to Dorian Tsai new QCR Seminar Coordinator! 
And Huge Thank You to David Hall for doing an awesome job for 2.5 years! 
Congratulations to Dr Dimity Ann Miller for being awarded her PhD for her research, "Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation for object detection in open-set conditions".

Congratulations to Gavin Suddrey on his final PhD seminar on Friday 17 September. His topic is - Instructing and Training Robots through a Natural Language Dialogue. 

Program videos  

 

QCR now has a set of dynamic feature videos developed by Dahlitz Media Perfekt Studios.  They highlight the work of our research programs: Physical interactionPerception and localisationVisual learning and understanding and Decision and control.   

Click the links above to view the videos.  Please feel free to share links to these videos with colleagues or industry contacts. 

QCR T shirts – Order Now 

We are putting together a T-Shirt order for all QCR members – we hope to have these available to
hand out before the end of the year. 

Please place your orders – here.  Orders are due by 4 November COB. 

See images and sizing below 

Women’s sizing blue / purple 

Size Guide 

  

S (8) 

M (10) 

L (12) 

XL (14) 

2XL (16) 

Half Chest (cm) 

41 

44 

47 

54 

58 

Body Length (cm) 

59 

61 

63 

65 

67 

Mens sizing – blue / purple 

Size 

S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL, 5XL 

Size Guide 

  

XL 

2XL 

Body Width (cm) 

47 

52 

56.5 

61 

64 

Body Length (cm) 

71 

75 

78.5 

82 

83.5 

  

  

QUT Survey 


Thank you for your feedback - we hear you! 

Key Points in the survey where:

  • QCR highly rated, well above the QUT centre average for all 14 questions. 
  • 4.55 / 5 average for QCR 
  • QUT Centre means ranged from 2.74 to 4.81 
  • High response rate 
  • Key positive comments focused on: 
  • Culture, communication, flattish hierarchy, respect, leadership 

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Key areas of interest to focus on: 

  • ECR (especially fixed term staff) development and career progression 

  • (More) mentorship and sponsorship from senior staff 

  • Best practice and valuing of diversity 

  • Industry engagement 

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HDR Internship News

We interviewed Robert Lee about his Google Internship.  See interview below: 

Where did you do your internship? 

I'm currently an AI Resident with X, the moonshot factory (formerly Google X). I'm working on The Everyday Robot Project. Due to the pandemic, I'm working remotely (from home). 

What do you enjoy most about the experience? 

So far, I've particularly enjoyed the opportunity to work with and learn from an amazing team of roboticists on a really interesting project. I've been able to witness first hand the exciting challenges of getting robots to operate in real human environments. 

How did you get the internship? 

I simply applied on the X website here!  

What advice would you give to others who are wanting to pursue an internship? 

I would recommend just applying for several and giving it your best shot! There are many opportunities out there for PhD students and it's a great experience.

Past Events


Marist Ashgrove Tour


Somayeh Hussaini hosted a tour for Marist College Ashgrove for 20 of their year 11 students on Tuesday 12 October. We asked Somayeh how the tour went "It was a great experience to host my first tour of QCR for the Marist College last week. The students were very interested in what we do. They were engaged in the conversations we had throughout the tour. They asked a lot of questions some of which I didn’t have the answers for. I have already sought for answers to better prepare myself for possible future tours. I hope they enjoyed the tour as much as I did while presenting to them."

STEM Camp Event
 

Last month the Young Accelerators team delivered the Future You STEM Summit (formerly STEM Camp) to year 11 and 12 students in Brisbane and Townsville. Each event gave the school students the opportunity to work with QUT researchers and students on practical projects for a taste of university life and future careers. Big thanks to Peter Corke who led two robotics sessions during the week, and Michael Milord who shared his insights an knowledge in a Q&A session on the topic ‘Science is Critical to Australia’s future’.

Workshop by Hugh Kearns

 
On Friday 1 October Hugh Kearns presented a workshop Managing Time: Managing Yourself: Managing Others.  Tobi Fischer has given his thoughts on the workshop:
 
Working smart, saying no, and get started. Those were my three key takeaways from Hugh Kearns' talk earlier this month. One Friday we learned about "Managing: Time, Self, Others". Hugh's presentation style was fantastic and engaging as always. He nicely pictured what happens to a 168 hour week when trying to squash in too many things, and the many breakout opportunities allowed us to practise the theory straightaway. Hugh also triggered us to think about our 1, 3 and 5 year plans, and how to best achieve them. Other topics included the student-supervisor relationship and how it changes throughout the PhD studies. Overall we had a great turnout, and hopefully many of the great materials that were provided alongside the presentation will see use in the next weeks, months and years to come within QCR.  We have five books  available that have been written by Hugh Kearns (see list below).  Please come and see Ilana or Vicki if you wish to borrow any of them.

Defeating Self-Sabotage - getting your PhD finished
Time for Research - Time Management for academics, researchers and research students
Supervising PhD Students - a practical guide and toolkit
The Seven Secrets of highly successful research students
Turbocharge your Writing - How to become a prolific academic writer
 

Robotics Seminar Series Catch up

Missed a seminar? Catch up here.

Seminars from 28 September 2021 to 19 October 2021

Debate Session 

Date - 28 September 2021 

Presenter Thierry Peynot 

https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/2ePcF5JqSiXjIYD/download?path=%2FDebate%20and%20Discussion&files=20210928_Debate_3_final.mp4 

 

The Basics of Trello 

Date – 5 October 2021 

Presenter David Hall 

https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/2ePcF5JqSiXjIYD/download?path=%2FTechnical%20Talks%2FTrello&files=20211005_David_Hall_final.mp4 

 

Intro to Differentiable Physics and Singularity 

Date – 12 October 2021 

Presenter Jack Collins 

https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/2ePcF5JqSiXjIYD/download?path=%2F&files=20211012_Jack_Collins_final.mp4 

 

Reactive Mobile Manipulation 

Date – 19 October 2021 

Presenter Jess Haviland 

https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/2ePcF5JqSiXjIYD/download?path=%2F&files=20211019_Jesse_Haviland_final.mp4 

Regular Events

HDR Catchup Morning Tea


Jesse and Scarlett have started a fortnightly informal catchup in person – first catchup was on Thursday 21 October at 10am and was held in the Cantina. It was a chance to connect with new and existing HDR’s and make sure everyone knows each other (even find out if people are working on similar projects). Students were able to share what they were up to and receive and give feedback to fellow peers. This event will be held every fortnight so next catchup will be Thursday 4 November at 10am.

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HDR Reps Update

Meet your new HDR Reps!

Scarlett is passionate about applications of robotics and machine learning for environmental conservation.  She is interested in underwater surveys of marine species on the Great Barrier Reef and improving automation with deep learning.  Her PhD aims to develop a deep learning architecture which reduces the necessity for collecting and labelling large datasets of images for training a deep learning model. Scarlett graduated from QUT with a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronics) with first class honours. 

Jesse graduated from QUT in 2018 with First Class Honours in a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering. He was welcomed to the world of research by his supervisor, Peter Corke when he completed his honours project, and a Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES) on the project “Interactive Voice Interface for Robotic Manipulation Demonstrator” in 2018/2019. 

Jesse currently pursuing his PhD with the centre supervised by Peter Corke. His research is concerned with mobile manipulation and how vision based mobile platforms can achieve useful outcomes in unstructured environments. 

Behind the Scenes

We interviewed Dr Tobias Fischer, Research Fellow on his work. See the interview below: 

What do you do in the Centre and what are you currently working on?

I am a postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Michael Milford. My current work is focused on bio-inspired visual place recognition using event cameras. However, I am very fortunate to collaborate with many researchers across the Centre on various topics that lie at the intersection of computer vision and robotics.
 
What’s on your desk?
(Too many) papers, a notebook, headphones, coffee & water, and some fruit.
 
How would you describe your work to a child?
I teach robots how to see and think.
 
Three words to describe your work?
Fascinating fun adventure
 
Where did you travel to last?
Woodgate Beach, a beautiful small coastal town near Bundy.
 
What’s your dream travel destination?
South America – I would love to see Machu Picchu.
 
Please finish these sentences…
I’m currently reading…….
A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey – I can highly recommend if you haven’t read it!
And currently wishing…..
A reunion with my family in Germany.
My last meal would be……
A platter-sized T-Bone steak (rare)
Final question! Tea, coffee or no caffeine?
Coffee!
 

HDR Internship Opportunities

There are currently 7 HDR Internship opportunities with APRIntern, please find the links below.  Please contact Susan Schlinker susan.schlinker@qut.edu.au, if you have any questions. 
 

APRInternship: Collation, Analysis and Publication of Queensland Government Research and Development Expenditure with Office of the Qld Chief Scientist  

APRInternship: Financial Innovation within the Independent School Environment with Trinity Lutheran College   

APRInternship: Natural Language Processing to Improve Health Outcomes with Health Translation SA 

APRInternship: Pathological Voice Analysts for Cardiovascular Monitoring Using Deep Learning with Keylead Health 

APRInternship: Data Science and ML of Haemodynamic data to improve surgical and ICU patient outcomes with PerfusionMap 

APRInternship: Home monitoring Smart Medical Device for Chronic Cardiovascular Monitoring with Keylead Health  

APRInternship: Next Generation Mobile Life Support System for Astronauts with Metakosmos  

 

Competition & Awards

The IET QLD / EA Student presentation competition


Somayeh Hussaini at the The IET QLD / EA Student presentation competition on 26 October - presenting her honours project on aircraft detection:  
https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/event/2021/09/iet-qld-ea-student-presentation-competition-39011

Research in Focus


Scarlett Raine’s entry, ‘Coral Reef Complexity’, is in the Top 10 of the Research in Focus competition, which aims to showcase interesting visuals in research at QUT.   
 

Please vote at links below: 

People’s Choice Award link (anyone can vote!): https://woobox.com/t23b3k 

Researcher Choice Award link (must be a QUT researcher to vote for this): https://woobox.com/pojvhq 

Collaborations, Grants & Projects

Funding Success


Fernando and Felipe obtained funding to install a Motion Capture System Optitrack worth $205K at GP-0134 and forms part of advanced QUT Flying Arena capabilities.  The System will be used for research and teaching within QCR, Australian Cobotics Centre and Centre for Biomechanics.  Funding was obtained from bids submitted to Strategic Major Equipment Program (SMEP) and FoE Capital Equipment.  The contract has been signed and the equipment will be installed and commissioned by early 2022. 

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Publication Highlights

Recent publications from QCR CI’s and AI’s 

GF Silva, A Donaire, MM Seron, A McFadyen, J Ford, “String Stability in Microgrids Using Frequency Controlled Inverter Chains,” IEEE Control Systems Letters 2021, vol. 6, pp. 1484-1489, Sep.2021. 
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9542941 

A Lengyel, S Garg, M Milford, JC van Gemert – “Zero-Shot Day-Night Domain Adaption with a Physics Prior”, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF …, 2021 
https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2021/papers/Lengyel_Zero-Shot_Day-Night_Domain_Adaptation_With_a_Physics_Prior_ICCV_2021_paper.pdf 

A Lengyel, S Garg, M Milford, JC van Gemert – “Zero-Shot Day-Night Domain Adaption with a Physics Prior Supplementary Material” 
https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2021/supplemental/Lengyel_Zero-Shot_Day-Night_Domain_ICCV_2021_supplemental.pdf 

J Mount – 2021.  Thesis – “Condition-invariant surface-based visual localisation for multiple domains and environments”. 
https://eprints.qut.edu.au/212979/1/James_Mount_Thesis.pdf 

Suman Raj Bista, David Hall, Ben Talbot, Haoyang Zhang, Feras Dayoub and Niko Sunderhauf  “Evaluating the Impact of Semantic Segmentation and Pose Estimation on Dense Semantic SLAM”, arXiv preprint arXiv 2021 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.07748.pdf 

H Byun, J Kim, F Vanegas, F Gonzalez, “Schmidt or Compressed filtering for Visual-Inertial SLAM?”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14229, 2021  
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.14229.pdf 

S Hussaini, M Milford, T Fischer – “Spiking Neural Networks for Visual Place Recognition via Weighted Neuronal Assignments”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.06452, 2021 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.06452.pdf 

 

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