Current Members
Dr Bruce MacDonald
Bruce is the Director of the Robotics Research group and a senior lecturer in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are aimed at creating useful robot assistants to help humans.
Dr Karl Stol
Karl is a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and joined the Robotics Group in 2004. His research interests are in multivariable control of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles. He currently supervises Part 4 Mechatronics projects and postgraduate students in this area. More information can be found at Karl's webpage
Dr Catherine Watson
Catherine is a senior lecturer in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her research focuses on speech, in particular speech production and speech modelling. See Catherine's home page for more details.
Dr George Coghill
George is a senior lecturer in Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on Artificial Neural Nets, in particular embedded ANNs in electronic equipment, especially in robots. See George's home page for more details.
David Brageul
David is a ME student, supervised by Dr. Bruce MacDonald. He is working in the area of Robot Programming by Demonstration (RPbD) and aims at improving an existing RPbD system developed last year in the Robotics Lab. Improvements notably include robot control through a graphical interface as well as finding an adequate way for the user to make the RPbD system understand their intention, i.e. the relevant parts of the demonstration.
Tanveer Abbas
Tanveer is PhD student working on Programming by Demonstration for helicopter robot under the supervision of Dr Bruce A. MacDonald. The aim of this research is to develop a platform to enable end-users(farmers) to program the helicopter (Rick’s UAV) by demonstrating their intentions through examples without knowing much about computer programming and helicopter control.
Ian Chen
Ian is a postdoctoral researcher in the Robotics Group. He was a PhD student working on a mixed reality simulation for mobile robots. The research aims to assist robot development by providing a 3D environment for real time visualisation and simulation. This research was supervised by Dr. Bruce MacDonald and Dr. Burkhard Wuensche. See Ian's research page for more details.
Chandan Datta
Chandan is a PhD student working on End User Robot Programming With Application In Healthcare. The research aims is to develop an application development environment for end users to author and define behavior on a mobile robot for institutionalized elders in a resthome. This research is supervised by Dr. Bruce MacDonald, Faculty of Engineering and Dr Elizabeth Broadbent,School of Medicine. See Chandan's pages for more details.
Stephen Thomas
Stephen is a PhD student working on low-altitude remote sensing using small/micro unmanned aerial vehicles. The research aims to develop an aerial vehicle capable of autonomous navigation and terrain mapping in large-scale unstructured (natural) outdoor environments. The potential of the system will be demonstrated by performing weed infestation mapping in a dairy farm environment. This research is supervised by Dr. Bruce MacDonald and Dr. Karl Stol. See Stephen's research page for more details.
Graduates and Former Members
Luke Gumbley
Luke provides technical support for the Robotics Research group. Luke is a graduate from the Department and completed a final year project for an initial prototype of our Integrated Robotics Development Environment, and is creating a new IRDE for his Masters.
Rick Chen
Rick is a PhD student working on the development of an aerial robotic UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) aimed at agricultural applications. The intention is to improve the work efficiency in a farm by using an autonomous flying robot to help the farmer with mundane and time-consuming tasks. This research is supervised by Dr. Bruce MacDonald and Dr. Karl Stol.
Alan Yang
Alan is a ME student who is developing a real time Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) system for use on Pioneer robots with the Player/Stage interface.The project is supervised by Dr. Karl Stol and Dr. Bruce MacDonald.
Dr Geoffrey Biggs
Geoff was a PhD student working in the area of robot programming systems, supervised by Dr Bruce MacDonald. His goal was to make programming robots as easy as programming desktop computers are today. See his homepage for more information and software.
Dr Toby Collett
Toby was a PhD student working in the area Human Robot Interaction and Augmented Reality. Check his webpage out for more details.
Slobodan Vukanovic
Slobodan was an ME student whose project was in the area of robot programming by demonstration. He was investigating how knowledge already acquired can be reused in new demonstrations, in order to minimize programming time. The project was supervised by Dr Bruce MacDonald.
Kathy Fung
Kathy was an ME student supervised by Dr Bruce MacDonald. Her field of interest is computer vision and robots control. The objective of her Masters research was to calibrate the augmented reality system developed by Toby Collett. Visit her page for details.
Jack Yu
Jack was a BE (Software Engineering) graduate from the University of Auckland. He was doing ME research for dynamic reconfiguration in robot software, supervised by Dr Ian Warren and Dr Bruce MacDonald. The goal of this project was to facilitate adaptive behaviour and to allow robot software to be maintained at run-time. In his spare time, Jack is involved with the robot soccer team at the university. Visit this webpage for more details.
Sigrid Roehling
Sigrid was a PhD student working on expressive synthetic speech under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Watson and Dr. Bruce MacDonald. She has put her PhD on hold to pursue other interests. More details can be found on her personal website.
Grant Sargent
Grant is now with a local robotics company, INRO. Grant provided support for undergraduate design papers and postgraduate research based out of the Robotics Lab (301-338). Grant has technical and management qualifications and experience across educational, commercial, emergency services and military industry sectors. He recently completed his Post Graduate Diploma in Business and is a Certified IPC Trainer (CIT) for IPC-J-STD-001.In his spare time, leads the Grand Challenge New Zealand technical team, is a certified Urban Search and Rescue Instructor.
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