When There is No GPS: Inside SLAM and LIDAR Navigation

Well, hi everyone and welcome to Visions.

You know, in this age of high-tech navigation, it seems second nature to just assume something like GPS is going to guide us wherever, whenever we need to go and whatever we need to do.

And for the most part, for most of us, that's very true.

But have you ever wondered what would happen if the GPS signal disappeared? Because it's a very real issue.

Indeed, for military operators, first responders, and autonomous systems working in contested or confined environments, GPS denial is becoming a real-world challenge across both air and ground domains.

So today we are pleased to welcome Dr. Stephan Hrabar, co-founder and chief strategy officer for Emison, an Australian robotics and mapping technology company that specializes in autonomous navigation, simultaneous localization and mapping, LiDAR mapping, and data analytics for challenging environments.

Welcome, Dr. Hribar, and thanks very much for joining us on Visions.

First, if you would, please give us a little background about yourself and what you've been doing.

Sure.

Thanks, James.

Great to be here.

So a bit of background by myself.

I did my undergrad in mechanical engineering in South Africa and a master's in mechanical engineering.

Started getting interested in the connection between computers and the physical world.

So I wanted to get into robotics.

So I moved over to the US and did a PhD in robotics at USC.

And my thesis was vision-based navigation in urban environments for UAVs.

I started working on drones back in around 2001.

He's been out of

one.

Yeah, no, this is sort of in the days before you could just go and buy a drone off the shelf.

We had to sort of hand-build, convert sort of gas-powered helicopters and stuff.

Yeah, so I started working with putting sort of cameras on drones back then to do stereo vision and optic flow based navigation.

And then ended up moving to Australia to join the CSIRO, which is a national research lab in Australia and continued working on drone autonomy, eventually adding LiDAR and sometimes radar to drones for doing perception and navigation.

And then eventually, yeah, just kind of combined the use of LiDAR with SLAM on a drone and saw commercial applications that decided to co-found Innocent and spin out the technology.