Research

1. Area of Research

My area of research is autonomous driving and mobile robotics. Especially the aspects of agent behaviour modeling, prediction and interaction, and exteroceptive perception, localization and mapping. I currently work as associate professor of autonomous driving at University of Tartu, Estonia, where I co-lead the Autonomous Driving Lab. In the past I have held various research/academic positions at Halmstad University, Sweden, Talllinn University of Technology, Estonia, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan, and Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes, France. 

2. Postdoc. (Halmstad University, Sweden)

I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Center for Applied Intelligent Systems Research, Halmstad University, Sweden (from July 2017 to Oct 2019). My research there focused on making autonomous robotics systems situation aware, so that they may navigate and operate in their environments more efficiently while ensuring safety, for application areas such as warehouse robots and autonomous driving. This includes robotic systems being able to classify agents and their behaviour, and adapt to changing and new environments. 

3. Postdoc. (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia)

My postdoctoral research (at Center for Biorobotics, Tallinn Uni. of Tech, Estonia, July 2013 to Dec 2015), constitutes the exploitation of flow sensing for underwater robotics. Underwater robots conventionally use sonar and vision sensors to perceive their environment, fish on the other hand also have the ability to sense flow, which they use for tasks such as predator avoidance, swimming in schools, orienting themselves upstream etc.

During my postdoctoral research I have worked on flow feature extraction. The flow features are based on histograms of frequency spectra of flow signals. I have applied the features for landmark recognition in semi-natural and natural environments and the results have been published in ICRA 2015 [draft]. I also worked on map-based localization using these flow features, and the results have been published in Autonomous Robots.

Flow sensing robotic probes Homer (left) and Kitty (right):

4. Ph.D. Research

My doctoral research (at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, Nov 2008 to Feb 2012) constituted the exploitation of novel multi-beam lidar devices for autonomous navigation. I worked with the 64-beam Velodyne HDL-64E S2 device. During the first part of my doctoral research, I worked in the calibration of multi-beam lidar devices, and the results were published at IROS 2010 [draft].

Multi-beam lidar devices provide huge amounts of rich data. The Velodyne HDL-64E S2 provides 1.33 million points/sec. During the second part of my thesis I worked on the extraction of compact features from lidar data for view-based localization. I proposed features that are based upon the histograms of surface normals, and also proposed a qualitative localization technique based on indexation and matching of the proposed features. Some results have been published at SSRR 2011 [draft], and details can be found in my doctoral thesis.

Robot Mana at LAAS-CNRS, equipped with a Velodyne HDL-64E S2 device:

5. Masters Research

During my masters thesis research (at Le2i, Le Creusot, France, March to June 2008) I worked on Extended-Kalman-Filter (EKF) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) for mobile robots. During the thesis I worked on the development of a Matlab toolbox to facilitate testing and evaluation of vision-based SLAM algorithms. Details can be seen in my masters thesis. A review of vision-based SLAM techniques, that I compiled during the thesis research, has been published at IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging 2009 [draft].

A simulation of EKF SLAM, ground truth in green and estimated trajectory in blue (units in mm):

6. Bachelor-of-engineering final project

During my final project of my Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering (at National Uni of Sciences & Tech, Pakistan, in 2005) I, along with 3 other team members, worked on the design and development of one manual and one autonomous robot for ABU Robocon 2005 (Wikipedia article about the contest). We participated in the competition as the Team Pakistan after winning the national qualifier.