Today, Friday, April 20th 2018, Mikkel Fly Kragh successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Lidar-Based Obstacle Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles.
Mikkels PhD study was part of the now completed SAFE project, which sought “to develop autonomous agricultural machinery that will be able to harvest green biomass and cultivate row crops – without animals or humans being exposed to any type of safety risk”. Mikkels work focused on detecting and recognizing obstacles using lidar-sensing and sensor fusion with cameras. He achieved this by both incorporating state-of-the-art methods from computer vision to his specific domain as well as developing his own novel methods, such as a conditional random field for lidar-camera fusion.
Mikkel will continue to work part time in the department, as he is starting an industrial postdoc position at the company Vitrolife A/S.
Mikkels PhD defence presentation can be seen in the video below.