Our CTO (Luke Cole) previously worked for Hemisphere GPS (orginally called BEELINE, and now bought out by AgJunction) as a "Robotics Engineer" implementing auto-guidance solutions for various quadbikes and agriculture tractors that was used by 100's of vehicles around the world.
For 10 years, starting as a teenager in 1998 - Luke Cole has also worked for leading research institutes and companies such as
NICTA (now called CSIRO Data61), CSIRO, Seeing Machines and ANU Robotics System Lab
(lead by Alex Zelinsky, who received a rare prestigious AO award in 2017 and was Defence Scientist of Australia from 2012 for 6 years). Luke's worked included various autonomous mobile robot projects, involving computer vision, and even a self-driving car early 2000's. Back then OpenCV and ROS didn't exist, so we did a "roll-your-own" called VisLib and DROS comprised of 364,578 lines of code.
Lance Cole has also worked at NICTA and has a background of
various hardware development, such as working for a contract
company to the US millary (EOS), building the Common Remotely Operated
Weapon Station (CROWS).
We have a long-standing robotics experience - our engineers offering Robotics Prototyping for Mount Bolton,
robot development and robotics custom software services have
something like a combined 50 years worth of experience in the
robotics field, from teleoperated and semi-autonomous mobile robotic
applications, to custom software and/or custom hardware for general
automation solutions, signal processing and control systems. Our
knowledge base started in NSW and ACT, but now we primarily service
East Coast Queensland.
We have developed autonomous mobile robots for air, underwater
and ground. Our professional experience started with developing
various control and sensor systems for small underwater vehicles in
the late 1990's. We where fortunate enough to have been involved in
one of the first self-driving car R&D projects back in early 2000's
using a 4WD (to support computers for the large processing
requirements). For an overseas client we developed a low profile
(70mm high) semi-autonomous mobile robot platform for manikin/dummy
mounting to simulate people moving (for vehicle crash safety and
collision development by German R&D car manufactures). We have been
fortunate enough to have been invited to the bulk of the German R&D
car manufactures where they develop and test self-driving and driver
assist development systems. We have developed various solutions for
2cm accuracy precision steering-guidance solutions for various types
of Agriculture tractors (via the CAN bus and ad-hoc methods), which
are still used by 1000's of tractors all over the world. We have
retro fitted Quadbikes to allow semi-autonomous control via GPS way
points. We have custom developed various indoor mobile robotics for
indoor localistion and SLAM R&D purposes.
Robot navigation is the task where an autonomous robot moves
safely from one location to another. This involves three primary
questions:
- “Where am I?” which is known as robotic localisation (hard).
- “Where am I going?” which is known as goal recognition (typically provided by a human).
- “How do I get there without collisions?” - path planning (easy) and obstacle avoidance (hard).
For robotic localisation and obstacle avoidance we use sensors to
solve the problem. To move along the planned path, we use control
systems.
We have a deep understanding of signal processing and
sensors of various types. We appreciate sensing is a hard
problem. There is no one-size-fits all solution. Odemetry (wheel
encoders) provide a cost-effective method to measure relative
position. however suffer from wheel slip and errors are accumlate
over time. GPS only works outdoors, effected by trees/buildings, and
without a nearby basestation (for expensive DGPS/RTK) the absolute
position error is several meters. IMU (accelerometers + gyros +
Magnetometer) suffer from drift errors and noise error causing
``random walk'' when integrated. Magnetometer are effected by
magnets, are slow to respond and measure magnetic north (not true
north). Infrared are cost-effective, but short range and saturated
by sunlight. Ultrasonic range sensors are cost-effective and good
for detecting large objects, but can't detect glass/water, only
measure a few metres, have a wide beam and provide medium
accuracy. RADAR uses radio (instead of sound) to detect objects at
long distance, but are relative more expensive then ultrasonic range
sensors. Image sensors (video cameras) are a cost-effective, rich in
information, and two or more can get depth information, but are
computationally expensive, hard to process the data (aka computer
vision), affected by dust/fog/rain, and light variations. LIDAR are
high accuracy (about 1mm), however are expensive (prices are coming
down every year), but can't detect glass/water. Distance measurement
sensors are easy to interpret, other sensors are hard. Colour
constancy and object classification is very hard (e.g. “Is it a tree
or a human?”).
We have a deep understanding of control systems. We
typically use Linux-based SBC's and a program a custom PID
controller - perhaps even a cascade PID controller, bayesian
filters, particle filters, kalman filters, Monte Carlo methods, or
train a deep neutral network. The outputs of these systems might
control various types of motors (e.g. brushed, brushless, servo,
steppers) and/or various types of actuators (e.g. linear, pneumatic,
hydraulic), and/or other things like lights or speakers.
We have been involved with computer vision and machine vision
since early 2000's - we where involved in the development of two
computer vision libraries before OpenCV became popular. Have done
much biologically inspired techniques such as optical flow. Was
involved in the early days of artificial intelligence using
techniques such as Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Haar-like
features (HAAR). These days we typically use machine learning
methods such as designing and training deep neural networks
(outstanding for vision-based object recognition using ImageNet).
We where involved in the development of a robotic operating
system which had 364,578 lines of code, before ROS was written.
We have developed custom software for various
manipulators, and have a good understanding of forward and
inverse kinematics.
We appreciate that challenges with robotics - particularly with
robot navigation, computer/machine vision, and manipulation with the
real-world, in real-time using real-robots.
Whilw we can custom develop robot navigation solutions. We can
fast-track robot navigation solutions for ground, air and water
based platforms via off-the-shelf autopilots. There are many
about these days. Some cost-effective open-source options include
Pixhawk 4, PX4, and ArduPilot. Some expensive closed-source options
include Auterion Skynode, Tersus AutoSteer, Embention Veronte,
Outback eDriveX and Trimble EZ Pilot.
We are confident with a broad range of skills and confident our
Robotics Prototyping for Mount Bolton services can offer solutions
such as:
- Autonomous Mobile Robots
- Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM)
- Path Planning, Goal Recognition
- Collision Avoidance
- Pattern Recognition
- Object Recognition
- Object Tracking
- Genetic Algorithms
- Neural Networks
- Evolutionary Robotics
- Probabilistic Robotics
- Machine Learning
- Deep Learning
- Optical Flow, Point Clouds
- Stereo Active Vision, Panoramic Cameras, Fisheye Lens/Camera, Log-polar Camera, Time of Flight Cameras, Camera Array
- 3D Reconstruction
- Manipulator, Biped and/or Quadped locomotion
- Sensor Fusion: GPS, LIDAR, IR, Ultrasonic, Vision
- PID Controllers, Cascade Control Loops, Fuzzy Logic
- Bayesian Filters, Particle Filters, Kalman Filters, Monte Carlo Methods
These technologies can be used for various applications such as:
- Lightweight Reconnaissance Vehicle (LRV)
- Remotely operated Underwater Vehicle (ROV)
- Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
- Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL)
- Multicopter / Multirotor
- Storm Drain and/or Pipe Inspection Robot
- Traffic Control Robot
- Gardening Robot
- Robot Lawn Mower
- Floor Cleaning Robot
- Home Land Security Robots
- Forklift Automation
- Load Haul Dump Automation
- Agriculture Automation
- Production Line Automation
- Asset Tracking
- Kid Tracking
- Pedestrian Tracking
We also offer a R&D robotic platform UGV for hire to help
rapid development of robotics systems. If you'd like to know more
please visit "Scotty Robot".
Some of our Robotics Prototyping for Mount Bolton and Custom Development Experience
Information About Mount Bolton
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