The RobotAssist team consists of students and researchers from CAS, a cross-institutional partnership between the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales and the University of Technology Sydney established in 2003. With over 200 staff and research students, CAS is the second largest robotics research group in the world with a leading reputation for both fundamental research and the application of this to industry. The centre has won prizes at international RoboCup competitions including winning the Best in Class Autonomy three years in a row at the Urban Search and Rescue competition.

We are undertaking research on “Autonomous Systems in the Society and the Environment”: Building on the achievements in “Field Robotics” the centre has now embarked on a new direction with the goal to understand and develop the robotics science enabling pervasive application of autonomous systems in broad areas of society. We are addressing research challenges in:

• Persistence to enable a robot to have a degree of self-awareness, an ability to learn and evolve over long periods of time, and to have the ability to repair or heal itself.
• Interaction and manipulation to perceive and understand human behaviour and needs, be able to communicate with users in a symbolic human-centred manner, respond safely and efficiently to directions, and have a morphology that promotes close physical cooperation between robot and user including grasping and manipulation of objects.
• Mobility to enable a robot to build and maintain meaningful perceptual representations.

Team Description paper

Our 2011 Team Description paper

• T. Peynot, R. Fitch, R. McAllister and A. Alempijevic, Resilient Navigation through Probabilistic Modality Reconfiguration in Proc of the 2012 International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-12), 2012, pp. 1-6.
• N. Kirchner, A. Alempijevic and A. Virgona, Head-To-Shoulder Signature for Person Recognition in Proc of the 2012 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-12), 2012, pp. 1-6.
• B. Hilsenbeck and N. Kirchner, Listening for people: Exploiting the spectral structure of speech to robustly perceive the presence of people in Proc of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-11), 2011, pp. 2903--2909 .
• T. O'Callaghan, S. Singh, A. Alempijevic, and F. Ramos, Learning Navigational Maps by Observing Human Motion Patterns in Proc of the 2011 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-11), 2011, pp. 4333--4340.
• N. Kirchner, A. Alempijevic, and G. Dissanayake, Nonverbal robot-group interaction using an imitated gaze cue in HRI '11: Proc. 6th ACM/IEEE Int. Conf. on Human robot interaction, Switzerland, 2011, pp. 497--504.
• N. Kirchner, A. Alempijevic, S. Caraian, R. Fitch, D. Hordern, G. Hu, G. Paul,D. Richards, S. P. N. Singh, and S. Webb, RobotAssist - a Platform for Human Robot Interaction Research in Proc. of the 2010 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA-10), 2010, pp. 1-10.
• S. Caraian and N. Kirchner, Robust Manipulability-Centric Object Detection in Time-of-Flight Camera Point Clouds in Proc. of the 2010 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA-10), 2010, pp. 1-8.
• D. Richards, G. Paul, S. Webb, and N. Kirchner, Manipulator-Based Grasping Pose Selection by means of Task-Objective Optimisation in Proc. of the 2010 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA-10), 2010, pp. 1-8.
• D. Hordern and N. Kirchner, Robust and Efficient People Detection with 3-D Range Data using Shape Matching in Proc. of the 2010 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA-10), 2010, pp. 1-8.
• Kirchner, N., Dissanayake, G., and Liu, D.K., Laser Range Finder Based Surface Type Classification IEEE Sensors Journal, vol. 9, issue 9, pp. 1160 - 1168, 2009
• Webb, S. Belief Driven Autonomous Manipulator Pose Selection for Less Controlled Environments. PhD thesis, UNSW, Sydney, 2008.
• Alempijevic, A., Kodagoda, S.R. & Dissanayake, G. Sensor Registration for Robotic Applications In 6th International Conference on Field Robotics (FSR), 2007
• Valls Miro, J., Taha, T., Wang, D., Dissanayake, G. & Liu, D. An efficient strategy for robot navigation in cluttered environments in the presence of dynamic obstacles In Proceeding of the Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Technologies (InTech ;07), pp. 74-81
• G. Paul, D.K. Liu, N. Kirchner, "An Algorithm for Surface Growing from Laser Scan Generated Point Clouds", Robotic Welding, Intelligence and Automation, Springer-Verlag, 2007
• Kirchner, N., Taha, T., Liu, D.K., and Paul, G. “Simultaneous Material Type Classification and Mapping Data Aquisition Using a Laser Range Finder”, Int. Conf. on Intelligence Technologies: Intelligent Technology in Robotics and Automation, Sydney,pp 124-129,12-14 December, 2007
• Ellekilde, Lars-Peter, Huang, S., Valls Miro, J. & Dissanayake, G. Dense 3D map construction for indoor Search and Rescue Journal of Field Robotics (JFR 2007), vol. 24, no. 1/2, 2007, pp. 71-89

• Alexander Joseph Virgona, Head-To-Shoulder Signature for Person Recognition Capstone Thesis, UTS, 26th August 2011, pp. 1-70
• Daniel Egan-Wyer Learning Repetitive Gestures By Demonstration Using Nonlinear Oscillators Capstone Thesis, UTS, 31st January 2012, pp. 1-64.
• William Bond Real Time Shape-Based Object Recognition and Learning Through 3D Point Clouds Capstone Thesis, UTS, 22nd June 2012, pp. 1-81.

• Popular Science, article by James Bullen Robot Wrangler OppSci's 10th Annual Innovators, October 2011
• UMagazine, article by James Bullen Autonomy and Action U Magazine: Teaching and Learning Special Issue, July 2011
• Australian Health Directory, YZnet Communications Pty Ltd Clearer vision for robotics researcher Australian Health Directory, 22 September 2010

RobotAssist Reel