Teresa Vidal-Calleja

Teresa Vidal-Calleja is a robotics expert focusing on enabling robots to be deployed in environments that are hazardous or difficult for people to access.

An Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute and Deputy Head of School (Research) in the School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at UTS, Teresa’s research interests include robotics perception, alternative sensing, inertial fusion, SLAM, continuous mapping, aerial and ground robots cooperation, autonomous navigation, automatic recognition, digital engineering, with applications in manufacturing, the meat and livestock sector, mining, and construction and logistics.

Teresa has an ARC Discovery grant to work on sensors for the next generation of infrastructure robotics. This research comes at a time when robots are likely to play an increasingly bigger role in helping maintain much of the world’s ageing critical infrastructure, as well as carrying out sanitation or delivery tasks without being at risk of catching a deadly virus. The main goal of Teresa’s ARC discovery project is to develop the theory and algorithms to allow “unconventional sensors” – for example, magnetic, acoustic or event-based sensors – to localise, map and characterise unknown environments.

In 2012, Teresa joined the Robotics Institute (formerly Centre for Autonomous Systems) at UTS where she was a UTS Chancellors Research Fellow and later Senior Lecturer. She has been a Visiting Scholar with the Active Vision Laboratory at the University of Oxford in the UK, and, more recently, with the Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zürich in Switzerland and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Germany.

Teresa Vidal-Calleja received her BSc in Mech Eng from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, Mexico, her MSc in Electrical Eng (Mechatronics options) from CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico City and her PhD in Automatic Control, Computer Vision and Robotics from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain in 2007.

During her PhD studies, she was Visiting Scholar at the Active Vision Lab, University of Oxford, U.K., and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), the University of Sydney, Australia. In 2008, she was Postdoctoral Fellow at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France. She went back to ACFR as Research Fellow from 2009 to 2011.