Andrew Vardy
Assistant Professor
B.Eng. (Memorial), M.Sc. (Sussex), PhD (Carleton)
I joined Memorial University in 2005 and am an alumnus of
Memorial, having completed an undergraduate degree in Electrical
Engineering in 1999. After graduation, I traveled to England to
complete a master's degree in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems at
the University of Sussex. Just recently I completed a PhD in Computer
Science at Carleton University in Ottawa. Much of the experimental
work for my PhD was carried out at Bielefeld University in
Germany.
My primary research topic is visual robot navigation. Robots operating in unstructured environments can exploit visual information to find familiar places and develop representations of new places. Insights from the study of animal navigation can be highly valuable in developing good solutions for robots. Research on the navigational abilities of insects suggests that very simple methods might suffice for visual navigation. Implementing these simple methods in robots provides both a means to test biological theories, and to develop efficient algorithms for robot navigation.
