Autonomous Vehicle Technologies for Transport Across Roads, Defence, Mines, Countries and Farms

Category

Excellence in Research and Development Award

Submitting Organisation

Centre for Robotics, Queensland University of Technology

Collaborating Partners

Ford Motor Corporation

Caterpillar

Rheinmetall Defence Australia

Department of Transport and Main Roads

Queensland iMOVE Australia

Royal Automobile Club of Queensland

Agent Oriented Software

NVIDIA

The Queensland University of Technology Centre for Robotics has led a portfolio of cuttingedge research and development of autonomous vehicle (AV)-related projects across the defence, mining, agriculture, and government sectors, building sovereign capability in defence and new capabilities in mining and agriculture to help local priority sectors remain competitive globally. Our work exposes local researchers to opportunities to work with the world’s leading companies in this space like Ford Motor Corporation and Rheinmetall. Key outcomes include new commercialized technology, employment opportunities, and impact on public and policy discussion in this area. The first users of the autonomous vehicle-related initiatives from Queensland University of Technology

Centre for Robotics are the mining (Caterpillar), defence (Rheinmetall, AOS) and agriculture (AOS) sectors, as well as local, state, federal and international governments in terms of the outputs Sydney around autonomous vehicles and their reliance on and interaction with infrastructure and high-definition mapping technologies.

The primary innovations in this program are both technological in terms of new autonomous vehicle navigation capabilities across multiple sectors, and methodical, in terms of crossdisciplinary collaboration at a truly national and international scale. Large federal research and industry teams have collaborated to create new sovereign capabilities in defence vehicle transport (Rheinmetall, AOS), whilst international consultation and collaboration across universities and policy groups has led to development of insights around autonomous vehicles, infrastructure, and mapping (iMOVE Australia, Department of Transport and Main Roads Queensland, Royal Automobile Club of Queensland).

Technologies developed here have huge transferability potential, and the mechanism to do so through our partnerships with Fortune 500 companies like Ford Motor Corporation and Caterpillar. Navigation technologies developed for underground mining vehicles could be adapted to above ground mining vehicles, and more generally to vehicle fleets across construction and other domain areas. Terrain traversability techniques could be adapted to enable smaller vehicle operation in an even wider range of environments, and potentially for drones and other platforms.