Robert Mahony

Robert Mahony is a Professor in the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University. He is a fellow of the IEEE and leads the System Theory and Robotics group at ANU. His research interests are in non-linear systems theory and optimization with applications in robotics, optimisation and computer vision. He played a pioneering role in developing practical optimization algorithms on matrix Lie groups and subspaces of matrices that are incorporated in the Ansazi package maintained by Sandia National Laboratories (http://trilinos.sandia.gov/packages/anasazi/). Motivated by problems in UAV control he wrote the seminal paper providing a clear exposition of non-linear complementary filters on the special orthogonal group for attitude estimation. This was an enabling technology in the early development of quadrotor robotic vehicles and is part of the expanding UAV and drone industry through implementations in open source DIY drones (http://diydrones.com/page/uav-devboard) community. It is one of the default observers in the APM open hardware and software system developed by Canberra UAV (http://www.canberrauav.com/). He was the first to provide a principled analysis for optic flow based control of aerial robotic vehicles and was a coauthor on the first experimental paper that demonstrated landing of a quadrotor vehicle on a textured but featureless surface. He was a node director for the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, an Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence that established robotic vision internationally
as a research field in its own right as separate from robotics and computer vision.