Author: Katherine Christensen

The Australian Cobotics Centre has some incredibly E.P.I.C. researchers. Each month we will be profiling a different researcher.

Fred (Fouad) Sukkar is a robotics researcher with several years of experience in the areas of agricultural robotics and industrial automation. Fred has been working on developing algorithms to enable natural and safe human-robot collaborative environments and is based at UTS.

We interviewed Fred recently to find out more about why he does what he does.

• Tell us a bit about yourself and your research with the Centre?

I am the postdoctoral research fellow for the Biomimic Cobots program which aims to enable robot-human collaborative work environments. My work helps to make cobots (collaborative robots) more intelligent through bioinspiration in order to carry out practical and valuable work in the real world. Recently, as part of my work with program 1 we developed a first proof of concept robot design for identifying and removing short bars from a conveyor line for our industry partner Infrabuild. The design of the system was inspired by the way workers currently carry out this task. The broader aim of my work is to enable robots that behave naturally when performing tasks with and around humans and to make their jobs safer. This is an important step for robots to become widely adopted and embraced by the manufacturing industry.

• Why did you decide to be a part of the Australian Cobotics Centre?

The ACC was a great opportunity to pursue my research interests alongside other prominent academics in the field. It was also an exciting opportunity to be a part of a first-of-its-kind effort to put Australia on the map for excellence and innovative research in manufacturing. The work with the centre extends my PHD research which was on robotic manipulator planning and perception.  In particular, I developed principled algorithms to increase reliability and efficiency while having some practical guarantees about the robot’s behaviour. Also, this role will be an opportunity to translate my research to industry and also explore some of my future research such as leveraging robotic learning methods to improve performance and solve a wider range of problems.

• What project are you most proud of throughout your career and why?

The work I did during my PhD on multi-robot active perception was a culmination of ideas to different problems I had been thinking about and working on for a long time while being in both academia and industry. It was the first real hardware demonstration of a system of its scale and complexity running in real time. The resulting paper titled “Multi-Robot Region-of-Interest Reconstruction with Dec-MCTS” won a best paper award at ICRA, the largest international robotics conference. The fundamental ideas behind this work are currently being used in the research I am working on with ACC.

• What do you hope the long-term impact of your work will be?

My hope is that my work with the ACC will lead to truly human-robot collaborative work environments where robots improve the quality of life of workers, whether it be a safer workplace or empowering them to carry out tasks that they would not have been able to do otherwise. I also aim to establish myself as a leading researcher in the field with the help of my excellent collaborators in the Centre. 

• Aside from your research, what topic could you give an hour-long presentation on with little to no preparation?

Apart from robotics, music is a huge passion of mine and I could easily give a presentation on one or many of my favourite bands such as Radiohead, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Mars Volta, Muse or Silverchair (just to name a few).

We’d like to officially welcome our newly appointed Chief Investigator, Müge Belek Fialho Teixeira to our Centre. Muge will be replacing Anjali who was the driving force behind the creation of our Manufacturing Floor of the Future video.

Müge is a creative maker, designer and transdisciplinary researcher, specializing in advanced manufacturing, digital fabrication, and parametric design.

She has worked with prominent architectural firms such as Zaha Hadid Architects, taught at several institutions including QUT (Queensland University of Technology), The University of Queensland, Istanbul Technical University, and Architectural Association (AA) Visiting Schools. She also has multiple publications in peer reviewed books and journals interviews, presented in many international conferences such as CAADRIA (Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia).

Currently, Müge is a Design Lead at ARM Hub (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) and a Senior Lecturer in the QUT Faculty of Engineering (FoE), School of Architecture and Built Environment (ABE) Interior Architecture. She was a Chief Investigator and a post-doctoral researcher at QUT in Design Robotics Project funded by IMCRC (Innovative Manufacturing Corporate Research Centre), that partnered with RMIT and UAP. She holds a BSc. in Architecture, a MSc. on “Collaborative Design Studio Environments” from Istanbul Technical University (ITU), and a MArch from Architectural Association School of Architecture Design Research Laboratory (AADRL). She holds a PhD focused on Trans-Architectural Design Paradigm, during which she studied for two years with Marcos Novak in University of California Santa Barbara, Translab. She is also the cofounder of [f]FLAT, an environment to research and develop design and media art works.

Her main research interests are in the areas of Transdisciplinary Design Research, Phenomenology of Perception, Multimodal Spaces and Pancomputational Design Strategies. She is interested in creating an understanding of our world out of our natural attitude through sensory experiences of space that are created using computational and digital strategies. She constantly looks for ways to expand the body of knowledge through transdisciplinary studies/thinking in design through making. Her understanding on the “world of making” is based on constant experimentation and pushing the boundaries of current discourses through rigorous applied research.

Welcome to Akash Hettiarachchi! Akash is a PhD researcher in the Centre, working with our Human Robot Workforce program based at QUT (Queensland University of Technology).

As new technologies are introduced, workers must re-train, upskill and adapt as production processes and specific jobs are re-designed. Opportunities exist to diversify the workforce, retain ageing or injured workers, and create a new employee-value proposition.

With the aim of expanding the available pool of talent and addressing attraction issues, this Project will look at the implementation of collaborative robotic technology across all Partner Organisations with manufacturing operations. It will explore the potential for new technologies to provide jobs that might be attractive to younger applicants and previously under-represented groups of workers in manufacturing, such as women or people with a disability.

Further, the study will consider how such technology might address retention and knowledge management issues by enabling injured or ageing workers to remain in meaningful and secure employment.

Welcome Akash!

Read more about the program.

Welcome to our newest PhD Researcher, James Dwyer based at QUT (Queensland University of Technology)! James is joining our Human Robot Interaction program and is supervised by Jared Donovan. His PhD project is entitled: “Human Robotic Interaction prototyping toolkit”.

Interaction Design relies on prototyping methods to help envisage future design concepts and elicit feedback from potential users. A key challenge the design of human-robot interaction (HRI) with collaborative robots is the current lack of prototyping tools, techniques, and materials. Without good prototyping tools, it is difficult to move beyond existing solutions and develop new ways of interacting with robots that make them more accessible and easier for people to use.

This Project will develop a robot collaboration prototyping toolkit that combines physical and simulated robotic systems to explore, develop and test new processes and work routines. The project will enable designers, engineers, and end-users to work together to improve the future of human-robotic interaction.

Read more about the program.