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.

Professor and Research Director at the Robotics Institute, 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 on flow field robotic perception. This research will develop new methods to interpret and predict changing environmental conditions using robots' onboard sensing, enabling the next generation of robots to be effectively developed and deployed in the field. Once adopted and commercialised by the fast-growing Australian field robotics start-up sector, this robotic technology has the potential to transform Australia’s emergency services and bring significant benefits to society by greatly improving the efficiency of first responders, reducing risks to the workforce and, more importantly, saving lives, homes, land and infrastructure. 

She also led 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.

As co-lead of Program 1 of the Australian Cobot Centre (ACC) an ARC Industry Transformation and Training Centre, she aims to help the manufacturing industry in the adoption of collaborative robots.

In 2012, Teresa joined the Robotics Institute (formerly Centre for Autonomous Systems) at UTS, where she was a UTS Chancellor's 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, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Germany and the Tokyo University of Science.

She received her B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2000, an M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering (mechatronics options) from CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico City, in 2002, and her PhD degree in automatic control, computer vision, and robotics from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, in 2007.

She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, and at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney.

She is currently an IEEE Senior member, former treasurer of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association, Senior Editor for IEEE/RSJ International Conference of Robots and Systems and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics and IEEE Transactions of Field Robotics.