Congratulations to Dr. Lee Clement for successfully defending his PhD on November 29! His dissertation, “On Learning Models of Appearance for Robust Long-Term Visual Navigation” focussed on enabling successful long-term autonomy (localization, navigation, and mapping) under substantial appearance change (due to lighting variation and other effects). We wish him success in the future!

Cybersecurity is already a critical issue – what will happen when we deploy thousand or millions of (potentially hackable) robots on our roads, in our hospitals, and inside our homes? Prof. Kelly is giving a keynote talk about these issues at this year’s CANARIE Summit in Montreal on October 1!

We’re super-proud of Erin Richardson, our lab alum, who was featured with the awesome aerospace engineer, tireless STEM promoter, and UTIAS graduate Natalie Panek in “Path Among the Stars” – a short segment aired during the CNN Apollo 11 documentary film (June 23, 2019). Congratulations Erin and Natalie – you inspire us to reach for the stars!

Interested in the challenges involved in building robust, reliable, and safe robotics software? Prof. Kelly will give a keynote talk on this topic at the CANARIE Canadian Research Software Conference in Montreal on May 29! More details, including the talk abstract, are available here.

Congratulations to our Ph.D. student Matthew Giamou for being awarded one of just five inaugural RBC Borealis AI Graduate Fellowships! This award will support Matt’s work on certifiably correct algorithms for safe and efficient state estimation. More information is available here: http://entrepreneurs.utoronto.ca/news-events/rbcfellowship/

Interested in where robotics is headed and how we can shape its future? We are organizing a day of head-to-head discussions at the ICRA 2019 “Debates on the Future of Robotics Research” workshop. Join us for a day of interesting debates and deep insights! And consider submitting a short position paper for the lighting talks session! Speaker lineup and position paper submission at http://roboticsdebates.org/ 

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our Self-Driving Cars Specialization on the Coursera platform, with instructors Prof. Steven Waslander (TRAIL) and Prof. Jonathan Kelly! You can find out more about the Specialization here, and check out the overview video on YouTube.

Huge thanks to Lee Clement, Valentin Peretroukhin, Trevor Ablett, and Filip Marić as well as staff and students at the University of Toronto and to Coursera for making this happen!

We’ve just open-sourced our Phoenix tail-sitter MAV project! The Phoenix is a dual-rotor tail-sitter platform for research and education. We’ve included design documents, CAD files, code, parts lists, simulation tools, and more – everything you need to build and fly your own Phoenix drone!  Check out the GitHub repository!

Prof. Kelly will give a keynote talk and a 1/2 day tutorial on visual-inertial navigation at the International Technical Symposium on Navigation and Timing 2018, November 13-16. Hope to see you in Toulouse in November! Check the ITSNT website for more information.

We’re excited to kick off the fall semester with two news students! Adam Hall (co-advised with Prof. Angela Schoellig) will be working on interactive perception, and Justin Tomasi (co-advised with Prof. Sanja Fidler) will be conducting research with our self-driving vehicle platforms. Welcome!