Ricardo Cannizzaro
I am a third-year DPhil (PhD) student at the Cognitive Robotics Group of the Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science, supervised by Dr Lars Kunze. My DPhil is funded by the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG). I have 8+ years of building software and hardware systems that perceive, understand and make decisions autonomously in complex real-world applications.
I am researching probabilistic generative causal models to encode formal representations of robot knowledge and world uncertainties, built from domain expertise and learned from data, for robot sensors, actuators, tasks, and decision-making processes. I am investigating the use of causal Bayesian inference for prediction, planning and decision-making, and causal explanations for robots operating in challenging complex, uncertain, and partially-observable real-world environments.
I am exploring the benefits of applying these methods to assure the autonomy of robots undertaking tasks in manipulation, assistive robotics and mine survey applications.
I am passionate about STEM education, outreach and diversity.
I am seeking PhD internship roles in causal AI/ML.
Research Interests: Probabilistic generative causal modelling, Bayesian causal inference, probabilistic planning under uncertainty, causal explanations, autonomy assurance, explainable AI, robot knowledge representation and reasoning.
To have a chat about my research or to discuss collaborations, please reach out to me at ricardo@robots.ox.ac.uk or via LinkedIn.
Work Experience
Before my DPhil I was working as a Defence Research Scientist in the Aerial Autonomy group of the Australian Defence Science and Technology Group (2017-2021), where my research focused on decentralised teams of autonomous aerial and ground robots for missions in challenging uncertain and complex environments, such as the urban terrain. My research was at the exciting intersection of AI/ML, software and hardware enginering to develop autonomous behaviours, integrate them into hardware, and experimentally validate the complete autonomous systems through flight trials in real urban environments across Australia, Singapore, Montreal, and New York City.
My AI/ML and robotics research at DSTG has spanned a wide range of robotics and AI/ML topics, including:
- Decentralised task planning in unknown environments with heterogeneous multi-robot systems
- Robotic swarming methods for scalable and adaptive drone data-ferrying
- Adaptive GNSS-SLAM localisation methods for autonomous robot navigation in mixed GNSS-available environments (internal technical report)
- Path- and motion-planning for safe, smooth, and efficient aerial robot navigation (internal technical report)
- Command, Control, Communication, and Computers (C4) architectures for autonomous drone system integration with federated common operation picture software (internal technical report)
- A novel Random-Finite-Set-based SLAM algorithm for aerial robots with scanning and solid-state LIDARS
- An evaluation of LIDAR and X-band radar sensors in a particle-dense environment for resilliant drone sensing
- Passive source localisation with a novel particle-filter-based bearings-only tracking algorithm
Past Education
I completed my Bachelor of Engingeering (Honours) (Robotics & Mechatronics) (First Class Honours) in 2016 at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, School of Engineering (4 years + industry-based learning year at DSTG). For my honours thesis project I created an autonomous ground robot system for remote chemical detection and localisation, under the supervision of Professor Zhenwei Cao and Dr Jennifer Palmer. I implemented a passive chemical-emitter localisation algorithm and integreated a novel bespoke DSTG chemical detection sensor into an autonomous Clearpath Robotics TurtleBot 2 robot system.
I completed my Bachelor of Science (Mechanical Systems) in 2012 at the University of Melbourne in Melbourne, Australia, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology / Faculty of Science. I spent 6 months at KTH Stockholm in 2012 as a visiting student at the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning and Department of Engineering Mechanics (Aerospace Engineering).