Dr Andrew Hill
Australian Centre for Field Robotics
Well-designed autonomous vehicles can benefit industry by acting more consistently and reliably than human-operated vehicles, increasing efficiency and safety. Fleets of autonomous vehicles can offer further benefits by optimising their actions to reduce congestion and redundant work, lowering fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions. All of these applications require robust planning and control algorithms, and this is the focus of Dr Andrew Hill's research.
"My work focuses particularly on using fleets of automated vehicles to perform large-scale industrial operations, such as hauling materials in mining or agriculture.
"While it's relatively easy to control a single autonomous vehicle driving on a straight road in good weather, controlling a whole fleet of autonomous vehicles that have to interact with each other in different conditions and scenarios can be much more complicated.
"Controlling a single vehicle typically means following a simple set of road rules designed for safety. Controlling a fleet requires you to optimise how these rules are followed for the fleet, deciding which vehicles should go where and in what order, constantly monitoring and re-evaluating and making predictions based on uncertain performance. It becomes even harder in the 'real world', where things rarely go to plan.
"Field robotics is the future of automation in the real world. It involves autonomous devices that operate outside the bounds of factories and production lines, instead interpreting and interacting with the world, with other machines and with people.
"While some people see the goal of robotics as 'replacing jobs with robots', that's really not the purpose. A lot of my work is about safety, such as moving people away from working in harsh desert environments or with dangerous explosives. It's also about efficiency, in that a lot of these tasks are boring and laborious, so people get distracted or cut corners and make mistakes. A person directing a robot to do these tasks still needs to make the same decisions, but the execution can be done more efficiently, safely and often with higher precision by a robotic vehicle.
"I've always been interested in making things work on their own. From Lego and Meccano to programming, I find building machines and making them do useful or interesting things a fascinating process."
| Project title | Research student |
|---|---|
| Continuous Action Recognition and Segmentation in Video using Limited Labelled Examples | Georgia MARKHAM |
| Integrating non-Markovian constraint satisfaction in MCTS for haul-truck dispatch under operational constraints | Milan TOMY |
Publications
Journals
- Leung, R., Hill, A., Melkumyan, A. (2023). Automation and Artificial Intelligence Technology in Surface Mining: A Brief Introduction to Open-Pit Operations in the Pilbara. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. [More Information]
- Gun, P., Hill, A., Vujanic, R. (2023). Coordinating Multiple Cooperative Vehicle Trajectories on Shared Road Networks. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 24(1), 274-290. [More Information]
- Khushaba, R., Melkumyan, A., Hill, A. (2022). A Machine Learning Approach for Material Type Logging and Chemical Assaying from Autonomous Measure-While-Drilling (MWD) Data. Mathematical Geosciences, 54(2), 285-315. [More Information]
Conferences
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2021). Experimental validation of structured receding horizon estimation and control for mobile ground robot slip compensation. 12th Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR 2019), Singapore: Springer Nature. [More Information]
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2020). The orienteering Problem with Replenishment. 16th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2020), Hong Kong: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2019). Energy Aware Mission Planning for WMRs on Uneven Terrains. 6th IFAC Conference on Sensing, Control and Automation Technologies for Agriculture (AGRICONTROL 2019), Sydney: International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). [More Information]
2023
- Leung, R., Hill, A., Melkumyan, A. (2023). Automation and Artificial Intelligence Technology in Surface Mining: A Brief Introduction to Open-Pit Operations in the Pilbara. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. [More Information]
- Gun, P., Hill, A., Vujanic, R. (2023). Coordinating Multiple Cooperative Vehicle Trajectories on Shared Road Networks. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 24(1), 274-290. [More Information]
2022
- Khushaba, R., Melkumyan, A., Hill, A. (2022). A Machine Learning Approach for Material Type Logging and Chemical Assaying from Autonomous Measure-While-Drilling (MWD) Data. Mathematical Geosciences, 54(2), 285-315. [More Information]
- Vujanic, R., Hill, A. (2022). Computationally Efficient Dynamic Traffic Optimization of Railway Systems. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23(5), 4706-4719. [More Information]
- Seiler, K., Palmer, A., Hill, A. (2022). Flow-Achieving Online Planning and Dispatching for Continuous Transportation with Autonomous Vehicles. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 19(1), 457-472. [More Information]
2021
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2021). Experimental validation of structured receding horizon estimation and control for mobile ground robot slip compensation. 12th Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR 2019), Singapore: Springer Nature. [More Information]
- Zhou, H., Samavati, M., Hill, A. (2021). Heuristics for integrated blending optimisation in a mining supply chain. Omega, 102(2021), 102373. [More Information]
2020
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2020). The orienteering Problem with Replenishment. 16th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2020), Hong Kong: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
2019
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2019). Energy Aware Mission Planning for WMRs on Uneven Terrains. 6th IFAC Conference on Sensing, Control and Automation Technologies for Agriculture (AGRICONTROL 2019), Sydney: International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). [More Information]
- Samavati, M., Palmer, A., Hill, A., Seiler, K. (2019). Improvements in plan-driven truck dispatching systems for surface mining. 39th International Symposium Application of Computers and Operations Research in the Mineral Industry (APCOM 2019), Leiden: CRC Press/Balkema. [More Information]
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2019). Motion Cost Characterisation of an Omnidirectional WMR on Uneven Terrains. 1st IFAC Workshop on Robot Control (WROCO 2019), Daejeon: International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). [More Information]
2018
- Gun, P., Hill, A., Vujanic, R. (2018). Improved Multi-Vehicle Trajectory Optimisation On Road Networks. Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA 2018), Sydney: Australian Robotics and Automation Association (ARAA).
- Palmer, A., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2018). Modelling Resource Contention in Multi-Robot Task Allocation Problems with Uncertain Timing. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2018), Brisbane: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
- Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S. (2018). Structured noise blocking strategies for receding horizon estimation and control of mobile robots with slip. Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA 2018), Sydney: Australian Robotics and Automation Association (ARAA).
2017
- Palmer, A., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2017). Methods for Stochastic Collection and Replenishment (SCAR) optimisation for persistent autonomy. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 87, 51-65. [More Information]
- Palmer, A., Vujanic, R., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2017). Weekly maintenance scheduling using exact and genetic methods. Mining Technology, 126(4), 200-208. [More Information]
2016
- Palmer, A., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2016). Applying Gaussian distributed constraints to Gaussian distributed variables. Information Fusion, 32, 1-11. [More Information]
2015
- Kassir, A., Shan, M., Hill, A., Nieto, J., Scheding, S. (2015). Multi-target tracking using weighted maximum-likelihood extended Kalman Filter. 2015 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA 2015), Canberra, ACT: Australian Robotics and Automation Association (ARAA).
2014
- Palmer, A., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2014). Stochastic Collection and Replenishment (SCAR) Optimisation for Persistent Autonomy. 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Piscataway: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
2013
- Palmer, A., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2013). Stochastic collection and replenishment (SCAR): objective functions. 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Tokyo, Japan: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
2010
- Underwood, J., Hill, A., Peynot, T., Scheding, S. (2010). Error modeling and calibration of exteroceptive sensors for accurate mapping applications. Journal of Field Robotics, 27(1), 2-20. [More Information]
2009
- Allen, T., Hill, A., Underwood, J., Scheding, S. (2009). Dynamic Path Planning with Multi-Agent Data Fusion - The Parallel Hierarchical Replanner. 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Kobe, Japan: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
2007
- Underwood, J., Hill, A., Scheding, S. (2007). Calibration of Range Sensor Pose on Mobile Platforms. IEEE/RSJ 2007 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2007), USA: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).