My PhD

My PhD Project

We are trying to use the extensive research that has been carried out on the rodent hippocampus to come up with a biologically inspired system that can be used on a real mobile robot navigating around a large, unmodified indoor environment performing useful tasks.  The possible applications of this work are in the short term in the area of mobile robotics whether that be service robots or robots wandering around on the surfaces of other planets.  In the long term by furthering our understanding of the true nature of intelligence this work is leading towards truly autonomous robots that have genuine thinking abilities, and in the ultra long term to sentient systems.

Below are a couple of pictures to give you an idea of what we’re doing, one of the Pioneer2 DXe robot we’re using and the other of the software interface for our RatSLAM system. We have also done experiments on an outdoor tractor robot from CSIRO.