Jack Collier

About

Jack Collier is a robotics researcher whose career has spanned foundational challenges in autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) navigation, perception, and control. Working primarily within Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), Collier has made enduring contributions to mobile robot path tracking, environment mapping, and intelligent control systems. His most influential work, "Learning-based Nonlinear Model Predictive Control to Improve Vision-based Mobile Robot Path Tracking" (2015), has garnered 195 citations and demonstrates how learned disturbance models can dramatically enhance off-road navigation performance. His early contributions to UGV path tracking using the Pure Pursuit Algorithm (2005) and outdoor terrain mapping with cost-effective lidar hardware (2006) helped establish practical baselines for the field. Collier also advanced multi-sensor place recognition by extending Bag-of-Words methods beyond vision to range sensors, and developed experience-based speed scheduling to push robots toward time-optimal performance. More recently, his work on lidar-based gesture recognition for robot teleoperation highlights an ongoing commitment to human-robot interaction. Across more than two decades, Collier's research reflects a practitioner's instinct for deployable solutions, bridging theoretical robotics with real-world Canadian Forces operational requirements.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Learning-based Nonlinear Model Predictive Control to Improve Vision-based Mobile Robot Path Tracking

   195 citations · 2015
2. 2
   Neural Network Based Lidar Gesture Recognition for Realtime Robot Teleoperation

   21 citations · 2021
3. 3
   Environment Classification for Indoor/Outdoor Robotic Mapping

   21 citations · 2009
4. 4
   Multi-sensor Appearance-Based Place Recognition

   15 citations · 2013
5. 5
   Speed Daemon: Experience-Based Mobile Robot Speed Scheduling

   14 citations · 2014
6. 6
   Path Tracking for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Navigation: Implementation and Adaptation of the Pure Pursuit Algorithm

   14 citations · 2005
7. 7
   Integration of a high degree of freedom robotic manipulator on a large unmanned ground vehicle

   12 citations · 2010
8. 8
   Software Systems for Robotics An Applied Research Perspective

   10 citations · 2006
9. 9
   The robotics experience

   9 citations · 2009
10. 10
    Continuous motion, outdoor, 2 1/2D grid map generation using an inexpensive nodding 2-D laser rangefinder

    8 citations · 2006

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links