Author Archives: Andy Keir

About Andy Keir

Operations Manager Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation

New UAV Challenge will push flying robots to their limits

Outback Joe is in trouble again and will likely need a new breed of flying robot to help him.

QUT and CSIRO have raised the stakes for their next international UAV Challenge after a team of enthusiasts from Canberra, Australia, won the previous Outback Rescue mission in 2014.

Announcing UAV Challenge Medical Express 2016 at an unmanned systems conference associated with the Avalon Airshow yesterday, event co-ordinator Dennis Frousheger said the 2016 challenge was designed to push UAV technology to the limit. Read more.

Recognition for Professor Rod Walker

At the recent CRC for Spatial Information conference held in Perth, the outstanding contribution made by former ARCAA Director, Professor Rod Walker (dec) in the domain of Research Excellence was posthumously recognised. The award was presented in recognition of outstanding contributions to CRCSI research and innovation promising high impact outcomes for end users. As founding Director of the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation, Professor Rod Walker was instrumental in conceiving the research that has led to the development of the autonomous aircraft guidance system (FAS) that is now saving Ergon Energy $14M a year in remote asset inspection costs. ARCAA has played a key role in helping Ergon spin-out the new ROAMES business to Fugro. His award was accepted by Rod’s brother, Dr Arron Walker.

Founding ARCAA Director, Professor Rod Walker

Founding ARCAA Director, Professor Rod Walker

Bio-inspired PhD positions available

As part of a collaboration between Boeing Research & Technology-­Australia (BR&T­‐A), The Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and The University of Queensland (UQ), we have two projects that seek to draw inspiration from nature to address aspects of guidance, navigation, and motion control for unmanned aircraft.

We are looking for highly­‐motivated individuals to complete doctoral degrees in areas of:

  • Inverse optimal control and Markoff decision processes
  • Probabilistic robotics
  • Guidance and motion control
  • Computer vision

    • For more information, please review this file ARCAA_PhD_Students, or contact

    Professor Tristan Perez
    Electrical Engineering and Computer Science – Queensland University of Technology
    Queensland Brain Institute -­ The University of Queensland
    phone: + 61 7 3138 9076
    email: tristan.perez@qut.edu.au

    Unmanned Aircraft: Countdown to Mission Possible

    DAA flight test crew celebrate a successful series of experiments.

    DAA flight test crew celebrate a successful series of experiments.

    Queensland Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) researchers have made what’s believed to be a world-first breakthrough for small Unmanned Aircraft (UA), developing an onboard system that has enabled a UA to detect another aircraft using vision while in flight.

    During the flight, the onboard system provided real time warnings back to the ground control station, resulting in a successful manual collision avoidance manoeuvre – a critical point for allowing UAs to fly in commercial airspace. The flight trial was carried out in unsegregated, class G airspace.

    The research, carried out by QUT’s Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) in conjunction with Boeing Research & Technology – Australia (BR&T-A) and UAS industry leader Insitu Pacific, was successfully proven in recent trials at an airfield north-west of Brisbane.

    Watch the video on QUTube here https://youtu.be/L3DEGr-HM0U or for more information see the QUT News story.

    Robots in Flight

    Check out Network Ten, Sunday 1st September @ 3pm for a documentary on the UAV Challenge Outback Rescue 2012. From the TV Guide:

    Robots take to the sky! Follow the journey of five teams, as they battle it out to be the first ever team to fly a UAV in to a search area, locate a lost bushwalker, drop a bottle of life saving water and return safely to the aerodrome.

    CNRS & Telecom Bretagne Professors in collaborative research

    Professors Jean-Philippe Diguet and Gilles Coppin from Lab-STICC / CNRS and Telecom Bretagne (France) have been visiting ARCAA from June 17th to 21st to initialize an official 3 year research cooperation program on UAV. This program, entitled SWARMS (management system of UAV surveillance), aims at designing a new generation of reconfigurable embedded system to enhance UAV with more autonomous behaviours.

    A second objective consists of designing innovative human machine interaction systems for a simplified mission-based control of sets of such autonomous UAV. 

    For further information, contact:

    jean-philippe.diguet@univ-ubs.fr, gilles.coppin@telecom-bretagne.eu

    Bushfire monitoring by UAVs

    As recently reported by ITNews and Slashdot, UAVs could be used in the future to assist with the forecasting of bushfires, and the monitoring, surveillance and assessment during and post event.

    Project ResQu, a 2-year, $7M collaboration co-funded through the Queensland State Government Smart Futures Fund, Boeing Research and Technology Australia, Insitu Pacific Ltd., CSIRO and QUT, will undertake the safety studies and develop the automated safety technologies necessary to enable the timely approval of UA for disaster recovery, as well as routinely delivering benefits through surveys for biosecurity and resource management.