Sam is a Research Assistant in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

He is studying towards a PhD degree under the supervision of Professor Richard Green.

Sam is involved with the Drones using tools project.

“As a research assistant, I develop and integrate software for the “Enabling unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to use tools in complex dynamic environments” project. Previously, I worked on a similar project enabling UAVs to prune pine trees autonomously.

My PhD work focuses on visual odometry (the process of estimating the motion of a camera using video that the camera is capturing). Existing visual odometry algorithms struggle to operate in environments where there is a lot of scene motion (for example, near trees moving in the wind). My research aims to make visual odometry more robust in these scenarios. This work will apply to the “Enabling unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to use tools in complex dynamic environments” project, as it will enable the position of the UAV to be estimated precisely and robustly in a wider range of environments than is currently possible.”