Dr. Kelly has been appointed Dean’s Catalyst Professor by the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, a title he will hold for three years. The Professorship is an early-career award to promote and accelerate the contributions of the Faculty’s most promising junior academic staff. Funding from the award will be used to further the Lab’s research in collaborative robotics.

Prof. Kelly is speaking tomorrow (June 14) about manipulator self-calibration at the Midwest Robotics Workshop in Chicago. Hope to see you there!

Thanks to everyone who attended the ICRA 2018 Workshop on Long-Term Autonomy and Deployment of Intelligent Robots in the Real World; Prof. Kelly gave a talk about developing collaborative robots for long-term service roles (“Designing for Long-Term Autonomy: Experiences with Collaborative Robots”). The panel discussion was great!

Prof. Kelly has been elevated to the status of Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – an award given for “significant contributions to the profession.” He began working with the IEEE as an undergraduate volunteer, initially holding the position of Student Branch Secretary.

Work by our own Matt Giamou, in collaboration with Jonathan How’s Aerospace Controls Lab at MIT, will appear at Robotics: Science and Systems 2018 in Pittsburgh! The paper, “Near-Optimal Any-Com Framework for Resource-Adaptive Inter-Robot Loop Closure Detection,” focussed on loop closures under communications constraints. Congratulations Matt!

New students have joined our research group this semester! Matthew Giamou and Filip Marić have both returned as Ph.D. students, to work on theoretical guarantees for the general SLAM problem and task planning algorithms for mobile manipulation, respectively. Tobias Ulrich has joined us as a Master’s exchange student from ETH Zurich, working on human-robot cooperative manipulation.

Welcome to all!

Interested in learning about how computer vision has been used on Mars? Prof. Kelly is giving a lecture on Wednesday, January 24, as part of the ASX Star Talk series – stop by to find out more. Hope to see you there!

We’re excited to have three papers appearing at ICRA 2018 in Brisbane! Valentin will present his recent research on deep pose correction for visual navigation applications; Lee will describe methods to learn lighting-invariant scene representations (a.k.a., “How to Train a CAT”); and Oliver, Trevor, Filip, and Luke will present their work on mobile manipulator kinematic and extrinsic sensor calibration via force and contact. Head over to our Publications page for more details. Hope to see you down under!

Prof. Kelly will be giving an invited talk at the University of Zagreb on robust, low-cost SLAM systems for assistive applications. Hope to see you in Croatia! Our related paper is available on our Publications page.

Welcome to our new STARS Laboratory M.A.Sc. students!

Olivier Lamarre has joined us from McGill University to work on projects related to planetary rovers navigation and scientific exploration. Emmett Wise hails from Queen’s University, and will be exploring an exciting project involving vehicle localization using ground-penetrating radar!

We’re excited to have the new team members!