Professor Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte is known for his pioneering work on probabilistic methods for robotics. The algorithms developed in his group since the early 1990s permit autonomous vehicles to deal with uncertainty and to localize themselves despite noisy sensor readings (simultaneous localization and mapping SLAM).
From 1986-1995 Durrant-Whyte held positions at Oxford University. In 1995 he accepted a professorship at the University of Sydney, where he was director of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 until 2010 he held the position of Research Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems (CAS), a joint venture between the ACFR and mechatronics groups at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales.
Durrant-Whyte became the CEO of NICTA in December 2010.