Abstract

Australia is a large, sparsely populated, resource rich country a long way from anywhere; and is consequently the ideal place to do field robotics. The past decade has seen substantial technical development and investment in large scale field robotics, especially in civilian applications such as cargo handling, mining, agriculture and marine environments; applications which are of central importance to the Australian economy. This talk will describe a number of technical advances in the areas of navigation, perception, machine learning, large platform control, and systems engineering that have enabled substantial progress in the ?science? of field robotics and which have led to significant commercial applications. The talk will also aim to look forward to the next decade, especially focusing on the development of machine learning methods for real-time operation of robots in large-scale unstructured field environments and where the opportunities for future commercial developments will come from.