From checkers playing robots to robotics and machine vision w/roboticist Peter Corke

What this episode covers

Peter Corke is well known for his work in computer vision and has written one of the books that define the area. We get to hear about his long and interesting journey into giving robots eyes to see the world. In this interview, Peter talks about how serendipity made him build a checkers playing robot and then move on to robotics and machine vision. We get to hear about how early experiments with “Blob Vision” got him interested in analyzing images and especially moving images. The interview ends with Peter adding a new item to the CV, fashion model, when he shows us the ICRA 2018 T-shirt! Peter Corke FAA is an Australian roboticist known for his work on Visual Servoing, field robotics, online education, the online Robot Academy and the Robotics Toolbox and Machine Vision Toolbox for MATLAB (matrix laboratory). He is currently director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision, and a Distinguished Professor of Robotic Vision at Queensland University of Technology. His research is concerned with robotic vision, flying robots and robots for agriculture. Corke is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics, and a former member of the executive editorial board of The International Journal of Robotics Research.