The QUT Centre for Robotics is working with the Australian Space Agency on the newly established Australian space program, in which robots will play a key role. There are multiple PhD projects available to work on different aspect of developing a new Lunar Rover (and later Mars Rover) and in particular its intelligence and autonomy. Future rovers will not only need to conduct exploration and science missions as famous rovers such as NASA’s Curiosity or Perseverance are doing right now on Mars, they will also need to conduct other practical tasks such as retrieving and transporting regolith or preparing construction sites to help establish human bases.
The projects in this program of the centre would focus on scene understanding, terrain traversability estimation, and identifications of features/areas of interest for those tasks, given the challenging conditions of the Moon or Mars, which can include permanently shadowed areas (on the Moon), dust storms (on Mars) etc