Meet the 2025 KISS Affiliates
Jessica Todd
Postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science
Hometown: Wollongong, Australia
Date of this Interview: December 20, 2024
What do you research?
I'm a field roboticist. I'm interested in enabling exploration and expeditionary science in extreme environments that are inhospitable to humans - how we can use robotic systems to go where human scientists cannot? My research is focused on developing planning and decision-making algorithms for autonomous science robots in extreme environments, such as the surface of Mars or the depths of the ocean. In such environments, communication with human operators or a human science team is extremely challenging due to the limited data bandwidth and delayed communication times. We need autonomous systems that can reason about the environment they're in and make decisions online about where best to sample to gather the most appropriate scientific data. I am researching how we can incorporate better online machine learning algorithms, scientific modelling, and multimodal sensing systems into robotic systems to enable them to act as autonomous science gatherers, essentially to help robots act like human scientists!
Why does space inspire you?
Space inspires me because its so full of potential - the potential for life, the potential for exploration, the potential for us to answer questions about our own origins and the origins of the Universe, the potential to inspire, and the potential for humanity to collaborate and come together to be greater than the sum of our parts. There will always be more things to learn and discover out there, about both the Universe and ourselves as a species, and that is incredibly thrilling.
If you could instantly travel to any point in the universe, where would you choose to go?
I'm fascinated by Exoplanets (probably from years of watching Star Trek!) so I'd want to explore some, perhaps Kepler 16b with its two suns, GJ 504 b which is bright magenta, or HD 189733 b where it rains glass . I'd also love to explore the subterranean oceans of Europa or Enceladus, looking for signs of microbial life!
Where can you be found when you’re not conducting research?
SCUBA diving somewhere looking for nudibranchs, hunting through independent bookstores, or chilling at one of LA's old movie theatres watching 70mm runs of retro sci-fi classics.
What book do you wish you could read for the first time again?
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Picture of Jessica conducting field research in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Here she dives with the CUREE robot as it swims over a coral reef using an underwater camera system to build photomosaics of the reef. Jessica uses these photomosaics for training machine learning algorithms that can guide a robot to seek out and sample interesting coral sites.