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!

Our laboratory received a Connaught New Researcher Award (at the maximum funding level) for the proposal entitled “Seeing the Light: Advancing Visual Sensing for Robust and Reliable Robot Navigation and Manipulation.”

The award will assist in our efforts to use vision data for navigation and manipulation in very challenging environments, under large lighting and appearance changes.

We’re happy to welcome new students for summer 2017: Filip Marić has joined us as an exchange student from the University of Zagreb, working on mobile manipulation as part of his MSc project, Yilun Wu from UofT Engineering Science will be conducting some exciting UAV research, and Luke Volpatti, also from Engineering Science, will extend our calibration tools. Looking forward to a great summer!

Congratulations to Valentin and Lee, whose paper, “Reducing Drift in Visual Odometry by Inferring Sun Direction using a Bayesian Convolutional Neural Network”, was accepted to ICRA 2017 in Singapore! Hope to see you there for the presentation!

Jonathan and Lee traveled to Japan this week for the 2016 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) in Tokyo, where Lee presented his paper, “Improving Stereo Visual Odometry Using Visual Illumination Estimation”, to an enthusiastic crowd of robotics researchers from around the world. We had some great conversations over Japanese beer and fresh sushi, and took in the sights and sounds of Tokyo, narrowly avoiding a typhoon in the process. The next ISER is in Buenos Aires in 2018 — see you there!

Lee won one of six competitive travel grants to attend ISER, and has a cool certificate to prove it!

Lee presenting his paper with the help of some smooth animations.

Roboticists love silly photos.

A big welcome to four new Master’s students (Brandon, Oliver, Jordan, Trevor), and five new undergraduate thesis students (Christine, Johnny, Jennifer, Jason and Willie) who have joined STARS lab this September! Head over to our updated people page for bios and research blurbs.

Congratulations to Jacob Lambert (along with his co-authors Lee Clement, Matthew Giamou, and Jonathan) for winning the Best Student Paper at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and Integration for Intelligent Systems in Baded-Baden, Germany!

Lee Clement was also awarded a travel award to the 2016 International Symposium of Experimental Robotics in Tokyo, Japan where he is presenting a paper on improving visual odometry through sun detection. Congrats Lee and Jacob!