What happens when you pile 8 hardcopy PhD drafts on top of each other? You get a lot of paper plane making material:

Thesis Draft Pile

My two superiors Dr Gordon Wyeth and Prof Janet Wiles (along with a number of other chief investigators) are awarded the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative Application “Thinking Systems: Navigating Through Real and Conceptual Spaces” Grant, worth $3.3 million over 5 years. Here’s the brief description of the project:

The project will provide fundamental insights into physical and conceptual spaces and develop applications in robotics and information systems. The project brings together national and international researchers to study how humans and other animals navigate: how trajectories through space are used to build maps, the neural bases of these mapping processes and how to use maps to achieve goals. The project will develop a new generation of robots that can learn about the physical spaces they work in, and create concept-mapping systems that can map and navigate information spaces. Also, it will provide new insights into the mechanisms regulating human cognition and mental dysfunctions.

What a PhD student gets up to after finishing their first draft and not feeling like getting back onto it straightaway…

Here’s a piccie of the little red tractor:

CSIRO red tractor

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.