Skip to menu Skip to content Skip to footer
Dr Thien-Minh Nguyen
Dr

Thien-Minh Nguyen

Email: 

Overview

Background

  • Dr Nguyen is a Lecturer in Robotics at the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, The University of Queensland. His research focuses on advancing autonomous 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 & mapping, and 2) cooperative strategies for multi-robot systems. These research directions address challenging scenarios such as inspection, exploration, and manipulation, where robust localisation & mapping form a solid foundation upon which collaborative schemes can unlock new levels of efficiency and scalability.
  • Dr Nguyen was previously a Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology Innovation (CARTIN), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), following the Wallenberg–NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, where he led collaborative research efforts between NTU and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from the School of EEE, NTU, with the best thesis (Doctoral Innovation Award) in 2020. He graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) from Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology in 2014. He is an active member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), and is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) in the area of Localisation & Mapping.

Availability

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

Qualifications

  • Bachelor (Honours) of Automation and Control Engineering, 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.

Supervision

Availability

Dr Thien-Minh Nguyen is:
Available for supervision

Looking for a supervisor? Read our advice on how to choose a supervisor.

Media

Enquiries

Contact Dr Thien-Minh Nguyen directly for media enquiries about:

  • AI
  • Robotics

Need help?

For help with finding experts, story ideas and media enquiries, contact our Media team:

communications@uq.edu.au