His early work on relational learning helped to the lay the foundations for the field ofInductive Logic Programming (ILP). With Donald Michie, he also did pioneering work in Behavioural Cloning. His current interests are focussed on Machine Learning applications in Robotics. He was the leader of the UNSW teams that won RoboCup four-legged robot competitions in 2000, 2001 and 2003; the winners of the 2014 and 2015 Standard Platform League and the team that won the award for best autonomous robot at RoboCup Rescue 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Claude Sammut has been a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, the Machine Learning Jourmal and New Generation Computing. He was the program and general chair of the 2002 International Conference on Machine Learning and the general chair of ICML 2007. He is a member of the board of trustees of the RoboCup Federation and was general chair of RoboCup 2019, Sydney. He is co-editor-in-chief of Springer's Encyclopedia of Machine Learning and Data Mining.