Speakers
Dr Navinda Kottege
Navinda Kottege
Artificial intelligence has learned to write, reason and converse. Its next leap is into the physical world: robots that walk, see and work alongside people in mines, farms, factories and construction sites. Dr Navinda Kottege, Research Director of CSIRO’s Cyber-Physical Systems Research Program, leads around 200 researchers in robotics, AI and computer vision, and co-leads CSIRO’s research on human-robot teaming, known as “Physical AI”. He also led the CSIRO Data61 team that took second place and a US$1 million prize at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, where robots had to navigate unmapped underground environments without human help. In this keynote, Navinda shows where physical AI is heading, how soon it will reshape the work at the heart of our communities, from mines and farms to cities and care, and why the future belongs not to robots replacing people, but to humans and machines working as a team for the communities they serve.
Navinda is the Research Director of the 200+ person Cyber-Physical Systems Research Program, conducting R&D in Physical AI at CSIRO. He was the Principal Investigator and Project Leader for the CSIRO Data61 team that competed and won the US$1M second-place prize at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge finals in 2021, ahead of teams from NASA, MIT and CMU.
Before stepping into the current role, He led CSIRO's 100+ person Robotics and Autonomous Systems group and also conducted and published research in legged locomotion with multi-legged robots focused on navigation in complex unstructured environments.
Navinda completed his PhD in Engineering at The Australian National University developing localisation technology for swarms of underwater robots. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and former Chair of the IEEE Queensland joint chapter for Control Systems/Robotics and Automation Societies. He is an Adjunct Professor at both the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland.
