Career
I graduated from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2019 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechatronics) with first class honours. My capstone project focused on the development of a deployable ground plane segmentation system for the ‘Carlie’ mini autonomous vehicle platform. This work transitioned into the commencement of my PhD research under the supervision of Prof. Michael Milford, Assoc. Prof. Thierry Peynot and Dr Sourav Garg in 2020.
I am particularly interested in research contributing to the scene understanding capabilities of autonomous vehicles and how to improve their performance in challenging conditions. I also have a growing interest in the application of probabilistic methods to robotics and neural networks.
Thesis:
Spatially Informed Scene Understanding for Robots and Autonomous Vehicles
Current Work:
Investigating how Visual Place Recognition can be used to improve semantic segmentation in challenging domains (e.g. night, fog, snow, rain) without additional training.
Previous Work Placement:
Towards the end of my Bachelors degree I secured an internship with Wood PLC which later turned into casual/full time work where the hours shifted to accommodate for my university commitments. Operating in over 60 countries, Wood is on of the world’s leading consulting and engineering companies within the Energy and Materials industries. Under their Integrity Management team I completed work on monitoring the integrity of upstream gas assets. This largely consisted of developing systems and analysis for monitoring corrosion within pipelines and other assets. These systems allowed for a risk-based inspection system and prediction of an assets remnant life. As part of a new development in the project I was part of the team beginning to develop Python and other software tools for automating the extraction and analysis of data from physical reports.
More Interesting Things
Growing up in a country town within Australia I was exposed to many different experiences which helped shape who I am and how I approach problems. Being the son of a livestock and station agent I have been involved with cattle work and rural property business for most of my life. In addition, many of my friends and family own and run crop farms which has given me the opportunity to learn about that side of the industry too and work with different heavy machinery.
Livestock Work:
Outside of helping family and friends with livestock work, I have also held a couple of jobs within the industry. Probably my first official job was working as a labour hand for Landmark (now Nutrien) at the Dalby Saleyards, receiving and penning cattle prior to sale day. This often included unloading cattle from trucks, drafting them into categories for sale (by weight and/or type - steers, heifers, bullocks, cows, etc.), and either moving them to the sale pens or the storage pens.
Once I moved off for university I then worked seasonally for Sandalwood Feedlot as a general labour hand, filling in where needed. This could include work on the Stock team which involved similar duties to the saleyards with the addition of treating sick cattle, periodic weight checking, and loading of cattle onto trucks once they were ready. Other times I was asked to work on the Feed team which could include driving trucks to distribute cattle feed, driving front-end loaders to grind hay and mix the commodities required for each feed type, or testing feed samples to monitor water content and quality. The final team I was asked to work in was the Maintenance team which included work such as building, mending and/or cleaning fences, pens, water troughs and water distribution lines and driving various vehicles and machinery including trucks, bobcats, tractors, motorcycles, loaders and excavators. As well as servicing vehicles and any other maintenance jobs that popped up around the place.
