‘Spatial AI for Robotics’ with Prof Andrew Davison – 1st Annual Azad Ayub Lecture
FREE public in-person lecture
Join the inaugural annual Azad Ayub Lecture* and hear from a pioneer in the world of robotics.
Andrew Davison - Professor of Robot Vision, Department of Computing; Director of the Dyson Robotics Laboratory, Imperial College London.
To enable the next generation of smart robots and devices which can truly interact with their environments, Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) will progressively develop into a general real-time geometric and semantic `Spatial AI' perception capability.
Professor Davison will give many examples from his team’s work on gradually increasing visual SLAM capability over the years. However, much research must still be done to achieve true Spatial AI performance. A key issue is how estimation and machine learning components can be used and trained together as we continue to search for the best long-term scene representations to enable intelligent interaction.
Further, to enable the performance and efficiency required by real products, computer vision algorithms must be developed together with the sensors and processors which form full systems. He will also cover research on vision algorithms for non-standard visual sensors and graph-based computing architectures.
Andrew Davison is Professor of Robot Vision and Director of the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London. His long-term research focus is on SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) and its evolution towards general `Spatial AI': computer vision algorithms which enable robots and other artificial devices to map, localise within and ultimately understand and interact with the 3D spaces around them.
With his research group and collaborators he has consistently developed and demonstrated breakthrough systems, including MonoSLAM, KinectFusion, SLAM++ and CodeSLAM, and recent prizes include Best Paper at ECCV 2016, Best Paper Honourable Mention at CVPR 2018 and the Helmholtz Prize at ICCV 2021.
He has also had strong involvement in taking this technology into real applications, in particular through his work with Dyson on the design of the visual mapping system inside the Dyson 360 Eye robot vacuum cleaner and as co-founder of applied SLAM start-up SLAMcore. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2017, and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023.
THIS EVENT IS FREE FOR EVERYONE, SIMPLY BOOK PLACES BELOW.
We do not issue tickets, the email sent to you upon booking will act as your confirmation.
The location for this event is the Sir Alexander Fleming Building, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, SW7 2BX. The event lecture theatre is on the first floor. The event will finish around 8.20pm and then refreshments will be available for Friends networking.
*The Azad Ayub Lecture
Azad Ayub has been a sustaining benefactor of Friends of Imperial College as well as an active Member and Trustee. In order to honour his vital support and generosity, Friends will launch the annual Azad Ayub Lecture in December 2025. Azad is himself an engineering alumnus at Imperial, so it is fitting for research in the engineering faculty to feature on the inaugural event.
To reflect Azad’s gift in communicating the engineering research and STEM education at Imperial College, this lecture will be FREE to all. A gift to you from Azad and Friends.
