Events

Insights and new questions for machine and natural learning of spatial intelligence in robots and animals

Speaker: Prof. Michael Milford

Location: 370 Jay Street, Room 825

Date: Friday, April 7, 2023

Our lab has spent the past two decades bridging the divide between our understanding of the neuroscience and behaviour underlying animal mapping, localization and perception systems, and creating their high performance technological equivalents for robots and autonomous vehicles. In this talk I will cover some of the key insights we’ve discovered from these very different research endeavours, in particular in going all the way from theoretical models of neural systems to high performance, deployable technology. Our quest to create reliable, introspective mapping and positioning systems for robots has also cast a light on the limited utility of the performance metrics so strongly favoured in current computer science research, that both challenge our concepts of how we conduct research, and reframe how we might think about analysing the performance of natural animal systems. I’ll also introduce the robot and autonomous system technologies our QUT Centre for Robotics creates, that fly through the skies, move through and under the sea, and drive across the land: on-road, off-road, and underground.