Ron received a NSERC industrial research fellowship and spent his post-doc researching robot vision at a local AI start-up company in Edmonton, Alberta. Since 1998, Ron has worked at the Syncrude Research Centre working on Intelligent Systems research. In May 2002, he helped establish the Centre for Intelligent Mining Systems (CIMS) in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, where he continues as an adjunct faculty member. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Ron's research interests focus on Intelligent Systems that combine sensor-based perception with decision mechanisms to produce actions that impact the system's environment. This work includes his research in Collective Robotics and his biologically inspired multi-robot box-pushing systems (see Bonabeau's cover article Swarm Smarts, Scientific American, March 2000), and using machine vision for real-time industrial process monitoring.
On September 12, 2003 Ron's life changed when he received a pancreas-kidney transplant. Since June 2001 he had been fighting end stage renal disease (ESRD) as a result of living with diabetes for almost 33 years. An anonymous donor family gave him the life-saving gift, which ended his daily dialysis treatments, dietary restrictions and insulin injections. Ron is living proof that organ donation saves lives. Read more ... (online article)