Andrew Davison: Background

From 1991 to 1994 I studied for a BA degree in physics in Oxford (First Class Honours).

Since 1994, I have worked almost continuously in vision-based localisation and mapping. Moving to the Department of Engineering Science in Oxford, from October 1994 to February 1998 I did a D.Phil (PhD) in the Active Vision Lab under the supervision of Professor David Murray. My thesis was entitled "Mobile Robot Navigation using Active Vision" (available from my Publications page) and presented one of the very first working robot SLAM systems.

Movies from my PhD work in Oxford: our robot (1) automatically acquiring and tracking arbitrary scene features during autonomous position-based navigation, (2) performing visual servoing to avoid an obstacle, and (3) combining these methods to perform an extended period of navigation, building a map of unknown features and using prior knowlege of just two known obstacle points to steer a safe path out of the laboratory door (ECCV 1998; PAMI 2002).

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Straight after submitting my PhD thesis, in February 1998 I went to Japan where I spent two years on a European Union Science and Technology Fellowship. This consisted of four months in Tokyo learning Japanese and then research in the Intelligent Systems Institute of AIST (previously known as ETL) in Tsukuba, with which I still have strong links, working with Nobuyuki Kita. See my old home page there. I had a fantastic time in Japan and recommend anyone to visit.

During my post-doctoral work at AIST, the focus was on vision-based navigation for industrial inspection robots, and included research on localisation for multiple collaborating robots (IROS 2000). One of the main advances was extending my work on robot SLAM into full 3D, modelling the motion of a wheeled robot driving on an undulating surface. In this movie the robot performs simultaneous localisation and mapping in full 3D while navigating on an undulating surface in an industrial inspection scenario (CVPR 2001).

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Returning to Oxford, from May 2000 to September 2001 I spent some time working on Markerless Human Motion Capture, in cooperation with Ian Reid and Jonathan Deutscher in Oxford and Vicon, makers of the leading commercial motion capture systems. See the this page in Oxford for results and movies (CVPR 2001). In parallel, I continued to work on SLAM and continued working towards increasingly general vision-based systems (RAS 2001).

From 2002 to 2007 I held an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, transferred from Oxford to Imperial in May 2005, and have worked full-time on single camera SLAM and its many applications.

Andrew Davison