20.05.2022
Congratulations to our MARS research team on completing another successful harvesting field test at Fankhauser Apples.
18.05.2022
Our Monash Apple Retrieving System (MARS) is on the Weekly Times!
04.05.2022
14.04.2022
Congratulations to Hanwen, Hugh, and Xing for the article ‘Real-Time Fruit Recognition and Grasping Estimation for Robotic Apple Harvesting’ being awarded “Editor’s Choice Article”.
01.04.2022
Our Monash Nova Rover Team is on the mission to Moon!
26.03.2022
Congratulations to the Research Team of Harvesting Robot, Wesley, Hugh, and Xing, for the successful demonstration at the Smart Farm in Tatura, as invited by Launch Victoria and Agricultural Victoria.
19.03.2022
Congratulations to Dr Xing Wang for completing his PhD thesis examination. His thesis title is “Soft Robotic Fingers and Vision Guidance Based on Deep Learning”. This research mainly consists of 2 parts: Part 1 investigates the advanced mechanisms applied to soft robotic fingers for grasping purposes, while Part 2 focuses on vision-based sensing via deep learning to guide the robotic grasping in the complex agricultural environment.
08.02.2022
Congratulations to Keenan and the coauthors on the acceptance of “Detecting occluded Y-shaped fruit tree segments using automated iterative training with minimal labeling effort” by the Journal of Computers and Electronics in Agriculture. For details, please visit https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1eXb-cFCSTdS3
14.01.2022
Congratulations to Xing, Hanwen, and the coauthors on the acceptance of “Geometry-Aware Fruit Grasping Estimation for Robotic Harvesting in Apple Orchards” by the Journal of Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.
15.12.2021
Welcome Kieran and Lan from the Victorian Agricultural Research Centre to visit LMGA.
14.12.2021
End-of-year photo of Monash Nova Rover Team. Another successful year for the team!
05.12.2021
Celebration of the end of 2021, and all the achievements made by LMGA members!
12.11.2021
Congratulations to Charles on the acceptance of “Modeling of Tendon-Driven Continuum Robot Based on Pythagorean Hodograph (PH) Curve and Control Polygon” by the Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA).
23.09.2021
Congratulations to Xing and the coauthors on the acceptance of “Bio-inspired soft bistable actuator with dual actuations” by Journal of Smart Materials and Structures.
16.09.2021
Congratulations to Hanwen for his first-authored paper receiving the 2020 Superior Paper Award, issued by Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, a prestigious journal in agriculture robotics. The paper is “Fruit Detection, Segmentation and 3D Visualisation of Environments in Apple Orchards”.
28.07.2021
Dr. Chao Chen is invited to give a plenary presentation in APAL Forum 2021, about the Monash Apple Retrieving System (MARS) which works autonomously, identifying fruit, avoiding obstacles, and self-driving through the orchard rows during harvesting. For details, please visit https://apal.org.au/life-in-mars-the-monash-robotic-apple-picker/.
07.05.2021
Congratulations to our apple harvesting team, Wesley, Hugh, Xing, and Hanwen, for the great success of the field tests in Fankhauser Apples. The contributions by our apple thinning team, Keenan, Zijue, and Rhys, are also appreciated. Our harvesting robot got a name now: MARS (Monash Apple Retrieving System). ABC News report on MARS is here: https://amp.abc.net.au/
09.04.2021
Congratulations to our Monash Nova Rover Team’s success in the Australian Rover Challenge 2021, organised by University of Adelaide. Our team won First Place after completing four lunar challenges.
03.02.2021
Congratulations to our Monash Nova Rover Team to achieve the Honourable Mention by NASA in the Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload Challenge.
https://www.herox.com/NASAPayload2/updates
23.12.2020
Congratulate Zijue Chen, David Ting and Rhys Newbury for their publication of “Semantic Segmentation for Partially Occluded Apple Trees Based on Deep Learning” in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.
10.12.2020
Congratulations to Dr Ao Xi for his achievement of his PhD degree and excellent publications during the study!
08.12.2020
Celebration of the end of 2020, a very challenging year, and all the achievements made by LMGA members!
12.10.2020
Congratulations to the Robotic Transverse Profiler (RTP) team members: Michael Stanley, Logan Vesty, Kee Ching Tee, Richard Chen supervised by Dr Chao CHEN on the nomination for the Research-Industry Partnership Award at this year “National Transport Research Awards”. RTP is an instrumental robot for high precision pavement measurement developed by LMGA under a collaboration project the Nanocomm hub and ARRB. The robot maintains in active service since its commissioning in 2016.
30.09.2020
Congratulations to Hanwen, Hugh & Xing for their research paper, “Real-Time Fruit Recognition and Grasping Estimation for Robotic Apple
Harvesting”, accepted for publication in Sensors. This paper proposed a light-weight one stage instance segmentation network to perform fruit detection and instance segmentation. Besides, a modified PointNet network was designed and implemented to perform fruit modeling and grasping estimation with point clouds from an RGB-D camera. The aforementioned two networks were applied to the design and build of an accurate robotic system towards autonomous fruit harvesting. Robotic harvesting experiments in both indoor and outdoor conditions are also included to validate the performance of the developed harvesting system. Experimental results show that the developed vision method can perform highly efficient and accurate to guide robotic harvesting.
10.09.2020
Keenan presented his work on New family of Translational Parallel Manipulators with Scissor Mechanisms in the 4th International Conference on Fundamental Issues, Applications and Future Research Directions for Parallel Mechanisms/Manipulators/
25.08.2020
Congratulations to Dr Hanwen Kang for completing his PhD thesis, with the title of Deep-Learning in Fruit Detection and Segmentation for Harvesting Robots. This thesis investigates the most advanced computer vision techniques which are used in object detection, tracking and image segmentation. These techniques are further studied and applied in a robotic harvesting robot, which can perform automatic target recognition, working space understanding, and crop harvesting.
24.08.2020
Congratulations to Xing Wang and Aarjav Khara for their research paper, “A soft pneumatic bistable reinforced actuator bioinspired by Venus Flytrap with enhanced grasping capability“, published on Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. This paper proposes a novel soft pneumatic bistable reinforce actuator (PBRA) design, which is bio-inspired by Venus Flytrap’s bistable mechanism allowing for the storage of elastic energy. The proposed design consists of two asymmetric 3D-printed chambers that are attached to a central prestressed steel shell to achieve bistability. By applying this bio-inspired bistable property into the soft pneumatic actuator, the performance in terms of the actuation speed, blocked tip force, load-carry capacity and stiffness has been significantly improved. A two-finger soft robotic gripper is finally designed, manufactured and experimentally validated to demonstrate its performance in grasping the objects with different contours and weights.
12.08.2020

11.08.2020
Congratulation to Xi Ao for his new research paper, “Walking Control of a Biped Robot on Static and Rotating Platforms Based on Hybrid Reinforcement Learning”, published on IEEE Access. The paper introduces a Hybrid Reinforcement Learning framework and applies it to a biped robot to generate stable walking gaits on both static and rotating platforms. The framework consists of a Hierarchical Gaussian Processes based model-based reinforcement learning part as the off-line Estimator, an Actor Network Pre-training scheme, and a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient based model-free policy optimizer. The proposed framework improves sample efficiency during the learning process and guarantees the adaptability of the biped robot to platforms with different angles, different magnitudes, and different frequencies.
15.07.2020
Congratulations to the Monash Nova Rover Team to win the second place out of 132 teams in NASA Challenge!
03.07.2020
Congratulations to Dr Godfrey Keung for the achievement of his PhD degree and excellent publication during the study!
02.04.2020
Congratulate Hanwen & Hugh for the publication of “Visual Perception and Modelling for Autonomous Apple Harvesting” in IEEE Access.
20.03.2020
Congratulate Hanwen for the publication of “Fruit Detection, Segmentation and 3D Visualisation of Environments in Apple Orchards” in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.
13.12.2019
Celebration of the end of 2019 and all achievements by LMGA members!
04.12.2019
Congratulate Hanwen for the publication of “Fast Implementation of Real-time Fruit Detection in Apple Orchards” in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.
03.12.2019

18.06.2019
Congratulations to our Monash Nova Rover team for achieving the 9th position among the 36 final teams at the Mars Desert Research Centre, and 86 teams participating this challenge around the world. The achievement was reported by ABC News, Channel9 News, and BBC News.
The full story can be found at: https://www.monash.edu/engineering/about-us/news-events/latest-news/articles/2019/nova-rover-team-take-on-the-university-rover-challenge
26.05.2019
The Monash LMGA Team made a great successful show of our developed Apple Harvesting Robot in the Global AI Product and Application EXPO in Suzhou, China. Our work was reported by the CCTV News.
26.05.2019
16.11.2018
Prof Liu, the Director of CAS at UTS, visited the LMGA at Monash and gave a talk
02.10.2018
Welcome Prof Jorge Angeles at McGill to visit Monash University and LMGA.
15.08.2018
Congratulations! Godfrey Keung’s provisional patent enters PCT phase.
17.07.2018
Mr Ao Xi successfully passed his PhD confirmation exam.
Mr YangJunJie Wang successfully passed his research master confirmation exam.
06.07.2018
Year 8 ChallENGe workshop hosted by LMGA of the humanoid robot programming workshop for the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
28.06.2018
Congratulations to our Nova Rover’s success in the 2018 Global Rover Challenge in Utah.
14.06.2018
Welcome Prof Antony Hodgson at UBC to visit the LMGA.
03.06.2018
Mr Godfrey Keung successfully conducts the experiment of knee exoskeleton on the treadmill.
28.05.2018


24.05.2018
Congratulations to Ms Zixi Liu for her award of The Excellence in Robotics!
23.04.2018
Dr Shao Liu successfully completed and validated analysis of a four-state epicyclic gearbox based on constraint analysis approach.
Ms Zixi Liu successfully developed the gait intention/phase detection criterion for level ground walking, stairs ascent and stairs descent under normal walking speed.
Mr Michael Stanley successful passed his PhD confirmation exam.
16.04.2018
Ms Zijun Chen Successfully 3D printed a linkage-based finger.
Mr Hanwen Kang Successful experiments of new algorithm on Lumbar Vert model.
Mr Keenan Peter Granland successfully detect apples by means of neural network.
Mr Godfrey Keung successfully passed mid-candidature review.
Mr Hanwen Kang successfully passed first-year confirmation.
15.12.2017
Monash LMGA successfully organised the Summer Summit of Screw Theory at Clayton Campus with University of Genova under the sponsorship of IEEE and ARC Nanocomm ITRH.
08.09.2016
Our paper, Path planning and assemly mode changes of 6-DOF Stewart-Gough-type parallel manipulators, is now published in Mechanism and Machine Theory.
03.09.2016
Congratulations to Shao for passing his pre-submission seminar: Design and Modelling of Robots for Minimally Invasive Surgery.
21.08.2016
Our paper, A cable linkage with remote centre of motion, is now published in Mechanism and Machine Theory.
06.07.2016
A robot for assessing road surfaces has been successfully developed.
08.06.2016
A new research paper of path planning in distorted configuration space is published in Robotica.
22.02.2016
Our paper, A Sekeletal Prototype of Surgical Arm Based on Dual-Triangular Mechanism by S Liu, L Harewood, B Chen and C Chen, is now accepted by Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics.
10.02.2016
Congratulations to Wesley for his new post-doc fellowship at UTS.
04.02.2016
Our paper, Inverse dynamic modelling of a three-legged six-degree-of-freedom parallel mechanism by S Abeywardena and C Chen, is now published by Multibody System Dynamics.
01.12.2015
Thanks to Shao and Wesley, the workshops in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering for students from John Monash Science School were successfully run.
25.08.2015
Dinner for celebrating Wesley’s thesis submission.
30.07.2015
Congratulations to Wesley for submitting his PhD thesis: Path Planning of Parallel Manipulators in Conguration Space.
08.07.2015
Thanks to Shao, the Year 8 ChallENGe workshops in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering were successfully run.
25.05.2015
Congratulations to Sajeeva for receiving his PhD with his thesis: The Monash Epicyclic Parallel Manipulator: A Novel Six Degree of Freedom Impedance-Type Haptic Device.
17.07.2014
Congratulations to Sajeeva for the submission of his thesis: The Monash Epicyclic Parallel
Manipulator: A Novel Six Degree of Freedom Impedance-Type Haptic Device.
17.06.2014
Thanks to Shao and Wesley, the workshops in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering for students from John Monash Science School were successfully run.
04.04.2014
The prototype of the RCM surgical arm was completed by Shao and Richard.
04.04.2014
Thanks to the efforts of all graduate students in LMGA, the first teaching experimental lab in MEC4456/TRC4800 was successfully conducted today.
21.03.2014
Congratulation to Wesley for the paper of “Generation of the Global Workspace Roadmap of the 3-RPR Using Rotary Disk Search” being accepted by Theory of Machines and Mechanisms!
21.03.2014
Congratulation to Stanley for the award of PhD!
18.03.2014
Congratulation to Jiabin for the paper of “Power analysis of two-dof epicyclic gear transmission and experimental validation” being accepted by the international gear conference.