Automation and Robotics
IRT facilitates advanced technologies and innovations in robotics, drones, computer vision, and autonomous systems.
Monash's robotics and vision work is known the world over, especially for combining sophisticated computer algorithms with multiple types of sensor on novel hardware platforms, to create robots that are able to understand their environment in a way that they can make intelligent decisions when given new tasks to perform.
IRT possesses robots equipped with 360-degree vision, laser rangers, 360-degree sonar and odour sensors. These robots can navigate through disaster sites, burrow underground, rescue divers, fly through the air, swarm like ants, generate maps, interpret changes and build up knowledge of the environment.
Intelligent robotics involves use of artificial intelligence with which to perceive the environment.
Areas include:
- Augmented reality, tracking, model-capture, feature matching, simultaneous localization and mapping;
- Autonomous road profiler, development of motion simulator, wind-speed forecast based on statistical methods and dynamics and control of power trains;
- Robotic railway inspection;
- Trajectory optimisation;
- Communication telemetry;
- Energy harvesting;
- Aerodynamic interaction structures: disturbances and design, ensuing stability of systems;
- Automation for inspection and maintenance of rail infrastructure;
- Instrumentation, sensing and monitoring;
- Algorithms for multi-agent systems;
- Mechatronics systems design;
- Navigational algorithms, navigational markers for mobile robots, autonomous mobile robot navigation, ultrasonic localisation and environmental mapping;
- Ultrasonic sensing, simultaneous localization and mapping, fast digital signal processing, field-programmable gate arrays; and
- Unmanned aeronautical vehicles, autonomous flight control, field-programmable gate arrays.
