Dr Tom Duckett - Lecturer / Senior Lecturer

Role

Reader in the Department of Computing and Informatics.

Biography

Tom Duckett was raised in Lincolnshire, studying at schools in Lincoln, Boston and Bourne. He obtained his B.Sc. in Computer Science from Warwick University, M.Sc. with distinction in Knowledge-Based Systems from Heriot-Watt University, and Ph.D. in Mobile Robotics from Manchester University. He also studied at Karlsruhe and Bremen Universities in Germany as an exchange student, and spent several years working in the UK software industry developing solutions for the food distribution and fresh produce industry. From 1999 to 2006 he worked at Örebro University in Sweden, where he held positions as Guest Researcher, Assistant Professor and Associate Professor. At Örebro University he was also leader of the Learning Systems Laboratory, one of four research labs within the Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, including supervision of 7 Ph.D. students. He joined Lincoln University as a Senior Lecturer in 2006, and was promoted to Reader in 2007. In 2008 he became Director of the Centre for Vision and Robotics Research, which specialises in two complementary areas: the analysis and understanding of image, video and other sensor data; and sensing and control for autonomous robotic systems. He has over 80 scientific publications, including 20 journal articles, with research interests including autonomous robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence, multi-sensor fusion, and food technology. Further details can also be found at http://robots.lincoln.ac.uk/

Qualifications/Memberships

Reader; Lincoln University (2007).
Docent; Örebro University (2004).
Ph.D., Computer Science; Manchester University (2001).
M.Sc. with distinction, Knowledge-Based Systems; Heriot-Watt University (1995).
B.Sc.(Hons.), Computer & Management Sciences; University of Warwick (1991).
Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
Member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Programme Committee, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
Programme Committee, Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS).
Programme Committee, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
Programme Committee, European Conference on Mobile Robotics (ECMR).

Research Interests

My research interests include autonomous robotics, computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence and sensor fusion. The focus of my current research is on information fusion for perception-based control of autonomous systems, especially using machine learning and computer vision. Essential tasks for autonomous systems include navigation in unstructured environments, which in turn requires exploration, map building (spatial learning), and self-localisation (“where am I?”); basic sensor-motor skills; and robust perception, e.g., for automatic recognition of people, places and objects. Reliable execution of these tasks requires information from many different sources, and consequently much of my work involves fusion of perceptual information from diverse modalities including colour vision, omni-directional vision, 2D and 3D range-finder sensors, etc., and under-exploited senses such as robotic olfaction (chemical sensing) and thermal imaging. I am particularly interested in the emerging areas of lifelong learning, as demonstrated by long-term operation of autonomous systems in dynamic environments, and extraction of semantic content from images. I have also applied my research in the related field of food technology, using computer vision and artificial intelligence for automating quality control of food products.

Teaching Interests

I have over 12 years experience of teaching at university level, including undergraduate courses in artificial intelligence, digital image processing, mobile robotics, and computer science; supervision of numerous B.Sc. and M.Sc. thesis projects; postgraduate courses in artificial intelligence and machine learning; and supervision of 10 Ph.D. students.

Representative Publications/Patents

Feras Dayoub and Tom Duckett. An Adaptive Appearance-based Map for Long-Term Topological Localization of Mobile Robots. Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2008), Nice, France, 22-26 September, 2008, pp. 3364-3369.
Henrik Andreasson, Tom Duckett and Achim Lilienthal. A Minimalistic Approach to Appearance based Visual SLAM, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Special ssue on Visual SLAM, Vol. 24, No. 5, October 2008 .
Martin Persson, Tom Duckett and Achim Lilienthal. Fusion of Aerial Images and Sensor Data from a Ground Vehicle for Improved Semantic Mapping, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 56, No. 6, pp. 483-492, 30 June 2008.
Tomás Martínez-Marín and Tom Duckett. Learning Visual Docking for Non-Holonomic Autonomous Vehicles. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Vehicles (IV08), IEEE Intelligent Transport Systems Society, Eindhoven, Netherlands, June 4-6, 2008
Martin Magnusson, Achim Lilienthal and Tom Duckett. 3D Scan Registration for Autonomous Mining Vehicles, Journal of Field Robotics, Vol. 24, No. 10, pp. 803-827, 24 Oct. 2007.
Per Munkevik, Gunnar Hall and Tom Duckett. A Computer Vision System for Appearance-Based Descriptive Sensory Evaluation of Meals. Journal of Food Engineering, Journal of Food Engineering, Vol. 78, No. 1, pp. 246-256, 2007.
Christoffer Valgren, Tom Duckett and Achim Lilienthal. Incremental Spectral Clustering and its Application to Topological Mapping. Proceedings of ICRA-2007, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Roma, Italy, April 10-14, 2007.
Grzegorz Cielniak, Tom Duckett and Achim Lilienthal. Improved Data Association and Occlusion Handling for Vision-Based People Tracking by Mobile Robots. Proceedings of ICRA-2007, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Roma, Italy, April 10-14, 2007.
Udo Frese, Per Larsson and Tom Duckett. A Multilevel Relaxation Algorithm for Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 196-207, April 2005.
Peter Biber and Tom Duckett. Dynamic Maps for Long-Term Operation of Mobile Service Robots. Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems I, Cambridge, MA, June 8-11, MIT Press, 2005.
Achim Lilienthal and Tom Duckett. Experimental Analysis of Smelling Braitenburg Vehicles (Best Paper Award, ICAR 2003). Proc. ICAR-2003, IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics, Coimbra, Portugal, June 30-July 3, 2003.
Tom Duckett, Stephen Marsland and Jonathan Shapiro. Fast, On-line Learning of Globally Consistent Maps. Autonomous Robots, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 287-300, 2002.
Tom Duckett and Ulrich Nehmzow. Performance Comparison of Landmark Recognition Systems for Navigating Mobile Robots. Proc. AAAI-2000, Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Austin, Texas, July 30-August 3, 2000.

Other publications

Check ePrints record