Thien-Minh Nguyen

Email:: thienminh.nguyen@uq.edu.au

Background

Dr Nguyen is currently a Lecturer in Robotics at the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, The University of Queensland. His research focuses on advancing robot capabilities in complex, large-scale environments through 1) principled and scalable fusion of complementary sensing modalities with distilled prior knowledge from learning processes for localisation and mapping, and 2) cooperative strategies for multi-robot systems. These research directions address challenging scenarios such as inspection, exploration, and manipulation, where collaboration unlocks new levels of efficiency, scalability, and resilience. Dr Nguyen was previously a Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology Innovation (CARTIN), Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He was also a Wallenberg–NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, leading collaborative research between NTU and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from NTU in 2020 and was awarded the Doctoral Innovation Award for the best thesis. He graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) from Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology in 2014.

Availability

Dr Thien-Minh Nguyen is:: Available for supervision; Media expert

Fields of research

Artificial intelligence Autonomous agents and multiagent systems Autonomous vehicle systems Cartography and digital mapping Computer vision Computer vision and multimedia computation Control engineering Control engineering, mechatronics and robotics Deep learning Engineering Engineering practice and education Field robotics Geomatic engineering Image processing Information and Computing Sciences Intelligent robotics Machine learning Photogrammetry and remote sensing Reinforcement learning Simulation, modelling, and programming of mechatronics systems Systems engineering

Qualifications

Bachelor (Honours) of Automation and Control Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam National University
Bachelor (Honours) of Automation and Control Engineering, Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology
Doctor of Philosophy of Control Systems, Robotics and Automation, Nanyang Technological University

Research impacts

Dr Nguyen has been active in developing novel localization, mapping, and sensor fusion methods for robotic applications. He has also developed several high-quality datasets that support the broader research community. During his fellowship at KTH and NTU, Dr Nguyen led a collaborative effort across three universities to develop MCD, a complex, large-scale dataset spanning three distinct campuses in Eurasia. The dataset features three survey-grade prior maps, continuous-time ground truth with centimetre-level accuracy, and tens of thousands of annotated LiDAR point clouds, supporting research in SLAM and semantic segmentation. He also developed CARIC, a lightweight digital twin model designed to benchmark cooperative inspection methods for heterogeneous aerial robot swarms.

Over the years, Dr Nguyen’s work has been published in leading robotics and computer vision venues, including:

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Dr Nguyen is a frequent reviewer for T-RO, RA-L, IJRR, ICRA, and IROS. He serves as an Associate Editor for RA-L in the area of Localization and Mapping and has held similar roles for ICRA 2025 and 2026.

Search Professor Thien-Minh Nguyen’s works on UQ eSpace