A partnership between the QUT Centre for Robotics and the Ford Motor Company to develop improved localisation and perceptions techniques for autonomous vehicles has won the Excellence in Research and Development Award at the 14th Intelligent Transport Systems Australia Awards.
The two-year project, which was launched in January 2022, looked at how cameras and LIDAR sensors, commonly used in autonomous vehicles, could better understand the world around them.
Professor Michael Milford, Director, QUT Centre for Robotics, led the research team which included QUT Research Fellow Dr Sourav Garg, Dr Stephen Hausler, and PhD candidates Ming Xu and Connor Malone.
“It was such an amazing field in the Excellence in Research and Development Award category, so we were humbled and honoured to win,” Professor Milford said.
“It is a valuable recognition of the innovative autonomous vehicle localisation work we have been doing with Ford over the past two years, both in advances in fundamental research and in translating that research.
“Developments have included more reliable positioning techniques that use the surrounding vehicles (especially in traffic) to stop getting lost, that adapt their behaviour to different places in the world, and which understand how the environment can change.”
The Ford researchers and staff on the project included Ankit Vora, Punarjay Chakravarty, Shubham Shrivastava and Richard Taube.
