Felipe Gonzalez

• Associate Investigator
• LinkedIn Profile
• QUT
• 2014 - 2021

Associate Professor Felipe Gonzalez is an aeronautical engineer with a passion for innovation in the fields of aerial robotics and automation. He is interested in creating aerial robots, drones or UAVs that possess a high level of cognition using efficient on-board computer algorithms using advanced optimization and game theory approaches that assist us to understand and improve our physical and natural world. He is the co-author of several books in UAV based remote sensing and UAV based design based on evolutionary optimization and game strategies and as of 2020 has published over 140 refereed papers. To date he has been awarded $10.3M in chief investigator / partner investigator grants ($6.7M total cash + in-kind contributions). This grant income represents a mixture of sole investigator funding, ARC DP, ARC LIEF, ARC Linkages, international, multidisciplinary collaborative grants and funding from industry.

A/Prof Gonzalez research spans UAV autonomy and UAV based remote sensing.  He currently leads two ARC Discovery projects on single and multi-UAV navigation in GPS denied environments. Hus research team is developing UAV systems which address the challenges in perception, localization and mapping. The systems being developed optimally balances localisation, mapping and other objectives in order to solve sequential decision tasks under map and pose uncertainty using an innovative approach by combining Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms with Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP).

Associate Professor Gonzalez works on UAV based remote sensing spans, agriculture, plant bio-security, air quality, environmental monitoring, and conservation. His research team has developed several object detection algorithms for wildlife and sealife, weeds, and coral bleaching and marine debris using UAV based RGB and hyperspectral data and deep learning.

In 2019 and 2020, he received a grant from Microsoft via the Microsoft AI for Earth program which is designed to use technology to help mitigate and adapt to challenges such as climate change and the catastrophic loss of biodiversity and the impact of marine debris in costal and reef ecosystems . In collaboration with the Australian Institute for Marine Science (AIMS) he has captured data from drones flying at 60m above the Great Barrier Reef at vulnerable reef locations.

He is also a CI on the “Airborne ultrafine particles in Australian cities: sources, effects and mitigation” Linkage project. This project aims to address the acute deficiency of knowledge in Australia on urban airborne ultrafine particles, originating from transport and other anthropogenic sources, which pose significant health and environmental risks. It consists of an extensive multi-city, cross-disciplinary study using state of the art instrumentation and data analytic techniques and UAVs.

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