AARC Events · Webinar Series
Webinars
The AARC webinar series brings researchers, engineers, and innovators from across the continent and beyond into conversation with our community — online, and open to all. Explore what’s coming up next and catch up on sessions you may have missed.
About the series
Ideas at the frontier of African robotics
Each webinar features a leading voice in robotics, AI, and intelligent systems — sharing their research, their journey, and their perspective on where the field is heading. Sessions are live, interactive, and always free to join.
Want to be first to hear about upcoming talks? Join our Discord — that’s where we announce speakers, dates, and joining links.
Upcoming
Coming up next
Aerial Autonomy in the Field: Perception, Persistence, and Control
Dr. Melissa Greeff · Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Aerial robots have the potential to transform infrastructure inspection, emergency response, and operations in remote or hazardous environments. But realising that potential requires autonomy that stays reliable beyond the laboratory, despite tight sensing, computation, communication, and energy constraints. Dr Greeff will present three applications motivating her research: building-envelope inspection, UAV-assisted search and rescue, and aerial imagery for zero-shot, GNSS-denied ground-vehicle navigation, showing how aerial robots serve both as autonomous platforms and as enablers of other robotic systems. She will then highlight two technology directions: autonomous landing on moving surface vessels, and CUDA MPC, a GPU-native solver for high-rate, long-horizon control. Together these projects aim to advance aerial robots that can operate where autonomy is hardest: over open water, in wind, and beyond reliable GNSS coverage. Dr Greeff is an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a faculty affiliate with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, working on aerial robots, vision-based navigation, and safe learning-based control. She holds a BASc in Engineering Science and a PhD from the University of Toronto.
Past Webinars
Catch up on what you missed
Control as Inference, Inference by Architecture
Dr. Michael Burke
As robot learning moves toward large pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, the central challenge is shifting from engineering explicit inductive biases to discovering and controlling the implicit structures inherited from architectures, datasets, and objectives. In this talk, Dr Burke argued that control theory provides a natural language for analysing these learned policies, treating the science of robotics as “system identification” for deep controllers. Using core principles such as observability, excitation, and stability, the session explored how we can better understand the transformation of information into behaviour, with key takeaways from his work on physical latent spaces, structured demonstration learning, and switching latent feedback controllers. Dr Burke is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and AI at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, with a PhD in Statistical Signal Processing from the University of Cambridge, an MSc from Stellenbosch University, and a BEng from the University of Pretoria.
Studying Cheetahs Through the Lens of Robotics: An African Perspective
Prof. Amir Patel
How do cheetahs move with such incredible speed and agility? This inaugural AARC webinar explored how robotics, computer vision, control engineering, and advanced sensing technologies are helping researchers unlock the secrets of animal locomotion — and what this means for the future of robotics, conservation, and innovation in Africa. A fascinating conversation at the intersection of robotics, wildlife science, and African technological leadership.
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Speaker announcements, joining links, and recordings all land in our Discord first. Come and be part of the African robotics community.