Welcome to Robotics
at the University of Waikato

Who are we?

There are two groups at the University of Waikato involved in autonomous mobile robotics research. In Physics, Dale Carnegie and his many students are primarily involved in robotics hardware problems. They build autonomous mobile robots for both indoors and outdoors, including autonomous submarines and helicopters. They are particularly interested in sensing and control issues in autonomous mobile robots. The second group centred in the Computer Science Department comprises a multidisciplinary team - two computer scientists, a physicist and a neuroscientist along with several students .With such a diversity in backgounds, the individual members bring a wide range of skills and interests to robotics research. For Michael Cree, the physicst, the focus is on sensing and prerception, in particular computer vision and image processing. Computer scientists Margaret Jefferies and Mike Mayo, are interested in finding robust, general purpose solutions to the robot mapping and navigation problem. They are also interested in how humans solve similar problems (cognitve mapping) and how cognitive solutions can help solve the robot mapping problem. John Perrone from Psychology studies how the human brain estimates self motion and also the motion of other objects in view. We are using the "human model" of motion estimation for a robot motion tracking system.