Month: December 2023

We are sad to farewell two of our researchers this month:

* Dr Mickey Clemon from University of Technology Sydney and co-lead of the Quality Assurance & Compliance program. Mickey has been actively involved in our Centre from the beginning, including the initial proposal

Mickey is returning to the US at the end of the year and Dr. Nathalie Sick will become co-lead of the Quality Assurance and Compliance program alongside Dr Michelle Dunn from Swinburne University of Technology.

* Dr Sean Gallagher, Chief Investigator from Swinburne University of Technology working with the Human Robot Workforce program. Sean has been a huge supporter of the Centre’s research.

Luckily for us, both will remain on as Associate Investigators. Wishing you both the best of luck with your new ventures. Thanks for being a part of the team.

At our annual symposium each of students were asked to create a research poster. For most of our students, this was the first research poster they have created. Click the PhD researcher’s name to find out more about their project.

At our annual symposium each of students were asked to create a research poster. For most of our students, this was the first research poster they have created. To support them in this, in the weeks prior, our Postdoctoral Research Fellows ran a training session on how to create an effective poster along with tips about how to engage with their audience.

The symposium provided them with an opportunity to practice talking about their research and its potential impact to those within the Centre. We also offered prizes for the top 3 posters as voted by attendees of the symposium.

Our winner was Yuan Liu from QUT (Queensland University of Technology) in our Designing Socio-Technical Robotic Systems program with Jasper Vermeulen (also from QUT and the same research program) coming second and Jagannatha Charjee Pyaraka from Swinburne University of Technology in the Biomimic Cobots Research Program taking third place.

You can view all posters on each of the PhD project pages HERE!

Our Biomimic Cobots research program have had a great couple of days at the 2023 Australasian Conference for Robotics & Automation) cohosted by UNSW and UTS Robotics Institute.

Our Centre’s researchers were involved in four papers accepted at the conference:

• Development of an Autonomous Mobile Cobotic Platform for Targeted Herbicide Dispersion, authored by Swinburne University of Technology‘s Kartik Choudhary, Jagannatha Charjee Pyaraka, and Mats Isaksson
• A Robotic System For Imitating Human Percussionists, authored by Fouad (Fred) Sukkar (University of Technology Sydney); Richard Savery (Macquarie University); and Nadimul Haque, Cédric LE GENTIL, Raphael Falque, and Teresa Vidal Calleja (University of Technology Sydney)
• Towards Recycling E-Waste Using Vision and Robotic Manipulation, authored by Philipp Kranz , Usama Ali , Adrian Müller, Maximilian Hornauer, Martin Löser, Fouad (Fred) Sukkar, Volker Willert, Dr Tobias Kaupp (Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt (THWS))
• Dynamic Object Detection in Range data using Spatiotemporal Normals, authored by Raphael Falque, Cédric LE GENTIL, and Fouad (Fred) Sukkar (University of Technology Sydney)

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Fouad (Fred) Sukkar also chaired the Machine Vision session.

We’d like to officially welcome two new Chief Investigators from UTS to the Centre and to our Quality Assurance and Compliance research program.

* Dr. Nathalie Sick is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Technology Management and a core member of the Centre for Advanced Manufacturing in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney.
Prior to joining UTS, Nathalie held positions as Assistant Professor for Innovation and Technology Management at the University of Muenster, Germany and led the interdisciplinary young research group Innovation and Technology Management in Energy Storage with the Helmholtz-Institute Muenster.

* Gavin Paul is an Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at University of Technology Sydney He is part of the UTS Robotics Institute where he leads the ‘Next Frontiers in Robotics’ research sector. Gavin and team are working with mining, transport, manufacturing, construction, space and partner institutions, to develop the next generation of robots and intelligent systems in the field.

As part of 2023 OzCHI conference held in New Zealand from 1-6th December, our researchers along with those from CSIRO, conducted a workshop on “Empowering People in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) Why, How, When, and for Whom”. This is the second year this workshop has run and this year it was hybrid.

During the workshop, there were over 17 attendees with a program that included:

• A panel discussion featuring Cécile Paris, Glenda Caldwell, Jared Donovan, and Hashini Senaratne on Why, How, When, and for Whom aspects of HRC,
• Two external experts, Christoph Bartneck, Mahla Nejati, who discussed barriers and pathways to HRC
• Presentations of 4 papers
• Road mapping activity and follow on presentation of these roadmaps.

A summary of this workshop will be available here: https://workshophri.github.io/OzCHI2023/

The workshop organisers included: Stine S. Johansen, ACC; Hashini Senaratne, CSIRO; Alan Burden, ACC; Melanie McGrath,CSIRO; Claire Mason, CSIRO; Glenda Caldwell, ACC; Jared Donovan, ACC; Andreas Duenser, CSIRO; Matthias Guertler, ACC; David Howard, CSIRO; Yanran Jiang, CSIRO; Cecile Paris, CSIRO; Markus Rittenbruch, ACC; Jonathan Roberts, ACC.