Fast Visual Motion Control

Rob Mahony is a Professor in the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University and has been a Chief Investigator with the Centre since its inauguration in 2014. His research interests are in non-linear systems theory with applications in robotics and computer vision.

He wrote the seminal paper providing a clear exposition of non-linear complementary filters on the special orthogonal group for attitude estimation; an enabling technology in the early development of quadrotor aerial robotic vehicles.  He was the first to provide a principled analysis for using optical flow of control of aerial robotic vehicles and was a coauthor on the first experimental paper that demonstrated landing of a quadrotor vehicle on a textured but featureless moving surface.  In 2016, Rob was named a Fellow of the IEEE, recognising his contribution to the control aspects of aerial robotics.

Nick Barnes is an Associate Investigator with our Centre. He received a PhD in computer vision for robot navigation in 1999 from the University of Melbourne. He was a visiting research fellow at the LIRA-Lab at the University of Genoa, Italy, supported by an Achiever Award from the Queens’ Trust for Young Australians before returning to Australia to lecture at the University of Melbourne, before joining NICTA’s Canberra Research Laboratory, now known as Data61@CSIRO.

He is currently a senior principal researcher and research group leader in computer vision for Data61 and ab Adjunct Associate Professor with the Australian National University. His research interests include visual dynamic scene analysis, wearable sensing, vision for low vision assistance, computational models of biological vision, feature detection, vision for vehicle guidance and medical image analysis.

Jochen Trumpf received the Dipl.-Math. and Dr. rer. nat. degrees in mathematics from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, in 1997 and 2003, respectively. He is currently the Director of the Software Innovation Institute at the Australian National University.

His research interests include observer theory and design, linear systems theory and optimisation on manifolds with applications in robotics, computer vision and wireless communication.

Professor Drummond is a Chief Investigator based at Monash. He studied a BA in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.  In 1989 he emigrated to Australia and worked for CSIRO in Melbourne for four years before moving to Perth for his PhD in Computer Science at Curtin University.  In 1998 he returned to Cambridge as a post-doctoral Research Associate and in 1991 was appointed as a University Lecturer.  In 2010 he returned to Melbourne and took up a Professorship at Monash University.  His research is principally in the field of real-time computer vision (ie processing of information from a video camera in a computer in real-time typically at frame rate), machine learning and robust methods. These have applications in augmented reality, robotics, assistive technologies for visually impaired users as well as medical imaging.

Yonhon Ng joined the Centre as a research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in January 2019. He is working on the Fast Visual Motion Control project under the supervision of Prof. Robert Mahony. He completed his PhD degree at the ANU under the supervision of Dr. Jonghyuk Kim, Prof. Brad Yu and Assoc. Prof. Hongdong Li. He also obtained his Bachelor of Engineering (R&D) at the ANU and was awarded with a University Medal.

Yonhon’s research interests include state estimation and control, 3D computer vision and robotics. He enjoys playing badminton, fishing and cooking during the weekend.

In 2008 I started with the ANU in the Computer Vision and Robotics group lead by Prof Rob Mahony, Jonghyuk Kim, Hongdong Li and Jochen Trumpf. Since starting at the ANU, the Centre of Excellence for Computer vision has been established and I have been involved with many projects within the centre including stereo vision water detection, multi camera array sensors, high speed optical flow hardware on quad rotors and work with light field cameras.  Our lab has a 4WD vehicle that is used for acquiring various data sets, numerous quadrotor aerial vehicles and a flight environment with VICON.  We also have a UR5 robotic arm and work cell used for computer vision and human/robot interaction.  I am helping to develop an environment to test high speed optical flow based machine control.

Timo started his PhD at Monash University in 2017, exploring new methods and algorithms to make use of the highly temporally resolved data produced by neuromorphic camera sensors with the aim of hardware accelerating these for use in real time applications. His work aims to improve on the RV2 Centre research project by exploring the use of novel visual sensors. Prior to his work at Monash, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Bremen, Germany and worked at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), as well as taking a two year break to travel through South America and Europe. In his spare time, Timo is a keen hiker and likes to spend as much time as he can outdoors and is a volunteer with Bush Search and Rescue.

Peter completed his Bachelor of Engineer (Reseach & Development) (Honours) and Bachelor of Science at ANU in 2018, majoring in Mechatronics and Mathematics respectively. In 2017 he worked as a student intern at Data61 at CSIRO in Brisbane. His engineering honours thesis, which he completed in 2017, looked at non-linear multi-agent system control theory using unit quaternions.

In October 2018 Peter commenced his PhD in non-linear observer theory under the supervision of Rob Mahony at the ANU. He is researching fast geometric observers for non-linear control problems, such as SLAM, with a focus on fast and computationally inexpensive implementations on mobile robots. In this research, he is also looking at novel hardware options for implementing these systems.

Sean joined the centre in 2016 under the supervision of Jochen Trumpf, Rob Mahony, and Viorela Ila. He received his Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in mechatronics and Bachelor of Science in mathematics at ANU in 2015. Presently, Sean is looking at applying the theory of infinite-dimensional observers to various dense sensing modalities, including light-field cameras. He has hopes that new, efficient algorithms will emerge from his research that will assist in certain robotic vision applications such as real-time depth mapping and odometry estimation.

Cedric completed his Master of Engineering (Mechanical) at the University of Melbourne in 2016. In 2015 he worked as a research assistant in the Fluid Dynamics lab at Melbourne before completing an exchange semester at ETH Zurich. His final year Masters thesis was a combined project with the University of Melbourne and The Northern Hospital, performing computational fluid dynamics studies on patient-specific coronary arteries.

In 2017 Cedric commenced his PhD in robotic vision under the supervision of Chief Investigator Rob Mahony at ANU. His PhD topic is high speed image reconstruction and deep learning with event cameras.