Associate Professor Peter Gibbens

Biography

Pilotless aircraft are increasingly being used in non-military applications, including agriculture and environmental management. Currently their navigation systems, like those of piloted aircraft, rely heavily on GPS. But if GPS signals are lost or jammed, an aircraft can quickly get lost or out of control. Associate Professor Peter Gibbens is working to address this issue by developing automated navigation techniques that replicate those of human pilots. "I believe that human behaviours have naturally evolved to be efficient for the tasks we have been doing throughout history, and this is what motivates my research in the development of automation techniques that mimic human behaviour. "As a pilot myself, it has always seemed logical to me that the automation of flight operations should follow the conventional human methods of aircraft control and navigating, but currently this is not the case. "For example, it is normal for a human pilot to correct navigational drift by cross-referencing visual features they see in the landscape with those shown on a map - but this is not a technique currently used by automated navigation systems. "Similarly, when driving a car around a bend, a human driver does not focus on keeping the vehicle within the lane lines immediately adjacent to the car; instead we keep our eyes on the road ahead and mentally predict where the vehicle will be some metres ahead of our current position, taking pre-emptive action (steering) to ensure that the car will be centred in the lane when it gets to that predicted position. Again, this technique - known as predictive control - is not widely used in automated systems. "By using cameras and other sensors to incorporate techniques such as these into the control and navigation systems of automated aerial vehicles, I aim to improve their precision, reliability and safety. "I've been working in control research since 1988 and in navigation and avionics since 1999. Being with the University of Sydney has allowed me the freedom to steer my research in innovative directions that I see benefiting the aerospace sector within the next 10 to 20 years.

Research Interest

Autonomous Navigation of Space-Based and Aerial Robots   Feature-based Visual Navigation in GPS-denied Environment