Research & Projects

Current Research & Projects

• Personal Research & Projects [ Since 1992 ]

Past Research & Projects

• Research & Projects with Hemisphere GPS [ February 2009 - January 2013 ]
• Research & Projects with NICTA [ 2004 - 2008 ]
• Research & Projects with ANU [ 2007 ]
• Research & Projects with CSIRO [ October 2005 - May 2006 ]
• Research & Projects with RSISE [ 1998 - 2003 ]

Research Areas of Interest

Luke Cole is primarily interested in understanding life from a robotics point of view, as opposed to a physicist point of view. As Luke's personal note on this home page suggests: is understanding life even possible? Well it is clear that developing robots as complex as humans is an extremely long way off, since it could be said, we must first understand the human brain (and maybe even the hypothetical multiverse where life exists - maybe thoughts are multidimensional?). Since Luke is not a physicist, but a roboticist, he's struggle to understand life comes from a very bottom-up approach. In this approach Luke attempts to at least mimicking life with autonomous mobile robots through primarily bio-inspired techniques, which currently has lend him to be interested in the following:

• Insect / Animal / Human-baby observations.
• Artificial / Machine intelligence.
• Genetic algorithms, neural networks and evolutionary robotics.
• Machine learning, deep learning, and long term learning.
• Speech recognition using mobile robot with stereo microphone, touch and vision sensors.
• SLAM using various sensors:
  • Mono / Stereo pan and/or tilt, ultrasonic / IR.
  • Array of fixed positioned, ultrasonic / IR.
  • LIDAR
  • Kinect.
  • Swiss ranger (or similar 2D LIDAR).
  • Vision.
• Feature / Object / Face recognition via various methods:
  • IR, Sonar, Vision, LIDAR, and/or Swiss ranger.
  • Geometric / feature matching.
  • Long term learning.
• Fast dynamic environment object avoidance and SLAM.
• Colour Constancy.
• Control theory.
• Manipulator / Biped / Quadped locomotion.

However Luke Cole is also interested in the following:

• Software / Electronics / Robots to replace basic (or even complex) human tasks.
• Linux.
• Computer networks.
• Hacking! From the common software / electronic security vunrabilities (aka ethical hacking and penetration testing), to hacking your brain and the laws of physics.
• The great unknowns of space and the existence of life.
• Oh yeh... and of course enjoying life! There's no point understanding life at the cost of not experiencing life!