Summer Gold Scholars Poster Competition

Henry Williams has won a $500 prize in Victoria University’s Summer Gold Scholars Poster Competition, for his poster titled “Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping: SLAM.”

Henry’s work over the summer involved researching the problems robots

have navigating unknown environments, and seeking ways to improve their performance, using a technique called SLAM.

SLAM enables autonomous robots to construct a map within an unknown environment while simultaneously tracking their current position. It uses an Extended Kalman Filter to reduce the inherent noise in the system, and combine the odometer and range data in order to determine the robot’s most likely location.

Henry’s research found that SLAM improved the performance of e-puck robots (palm-size autonomous robots) in the localisation and mapping of an unknown maze, enabling each robot to keep itself localised within 0.05cm of its true location.

This increased precision and accuracy in mapping and localisation has important potential benefits; for example, the development of robots that can successfully navigate unknown environments such as spaces in collapsed buildings.