Category: team members

Jonathan Roberts

I am a Professor in Robotics within the School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I am the Director of the Australian Cobotics Centre and also the Technical Director of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM Hub. I am a Chief Investigator at the QUT Centre for Robotics, and an Associate Investigator at QUT’s Centre for Biomedical Technologies. My main research interests are in the areas of Field Robotics and robotics that incorporates human interaction such as Medical Robotics, Performance Robotics and Design Robotics.

I graduated from the University of Southampton, UK, in 1991 with an Honours degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering. I then furthered my interest in computer vision while completing a PhD (1991-1994) at the University of Southampton where I also developed skills in parallel computing. In 1995 I joined CSIRO (Australia’s largest government research agency) to work in the area of mining robotics where I worked on numerous large robot machines including 3,500 tonne draglines, 30 tonne underground haul trucks and autonomous underground explosive loading vehicles. Work with my colleagues on the navigation system of semi-autonomous Load-Haul-Dump (LHD) vehicles was commercialised by Caterpillar.

I was appointed a Science Leader at CSIRO in the area of Robotics and then went on to lead the Autonomous Systems Laboratory also at CSIRO where I was Research Director. I co-invented the UAV Challenge Outback Rescue, an international flying robot competition in which teams search for a lost bushwalker using autonomous robotic aircraft, and I am featured on BBC International News in 2014 and 2016 talking about the event.

In 2013 I, along with my research team, won the Australia and New Zealand Internet Award for Innovation for their Museum Robot Project. This project deployed two mobile robots in the National Museum of Australia in Canberra which were used by remote school students to visit the museum with an educator guide, on a weekly basis. In 2013, I made international news by being the first person to 3D map the interior of the Leaning Tower of Pisa using our team’s Zebedee mobile mapping system. My colleagues and I mapped Fort Lytton in Brisbane in conjunction with Queensland Parks and The University of Queensland, and it became the first Australian heritage site to be archived on CyArk, the international digital cultural heritage database.

In 2014 I left CSIRO to join QUT and in 2017 I became a Chief Investigator at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. I was part of the team that in 2017 was awarded an Australia-India Strategic Research Fund project to develop new vision technologies for minimally invasive knee surgery.

I was President of the Australian Robotics & Automation Association Inc. from 2007-2008, and between 2008 and 2013 was Deputy Research Director of the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA), a joint venture between CSIRO and Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I am a frequent contributor to The Conversation where I write on many topics related to robotics and the use of technology in society.

Steph Hutchison

Steph Hutchison is an artist-researcher, choreographer, performer, and teaching-artist. Steph has a rich dance practice as a solo choreographer/performer and collaborator within dance and technology contexts. As a dance artist Steph creates and performs primarily improvised solo dance works that focus on extreme physicality and endurance of the human body, or engage a dialogue with digital technologies and systems. Steph’s work is also informed by her collaborations with motion capture, animation, robotics, haptics, and artificially intelligent performance agents. She has collaborated extensively on art, research, and industry projects with Deakin Motion.lab (2009 – 2016), John McCormick (2014 – present), and Louis-Philippe Demers (2018). As a teaching-artist Steph began her practice as Artist in Residence for Arts Centre Melbourne (2005 – 2011). Teaching artistry underpins Steph’s work as a dance academic.

Steph completed her PhD research at Deakin University’s Motion.lab – meta: discourses from dancers inside action machines. Her PhD research was informed by her choreographic and performance practice in contemporary dance, circus arts, improvisation and technology contexts. In meta, Steph researched the dancer’s experience within different systems – techniques and practices of the body, environments, with equipment, and technologies. She was focused on how systems operate to produce new kinds of bodies in dance. This builds on her Master of Arts research into the hybrid body in dance, and is applied within her collaborations and the development of her teaching practice. Understanding systems and working in collaboration with systems and technologies enables Steph to collaborate extensively on research projects such as Dance Haptics – making dance performance accessible to vision impaired, blind and deaf-blind people. And, to teach in transdisciplinary contexts where embodied practice and embodied experiences can be developed to transform participant’s experience, knowledge and ideas as they work in creative collaborations with digital technologies. Steph’s current research builds upon her Physical Thinking Prototypes establishing processes, methods and systems for constructing dancing bodies and ways of thinking in the digital age. Physical Thinking Prototypes also provided a methodology for calibrating participants systems within the Ars Electronica Futurelab Academy at QUT (2017 & 2018) – enabling, opening and creating potentials via embodied practice and experience.