Author: Merryn Ballantyne

On Tuesday 7th February, Jobs Queensland and the Australian Cobotics Centre officially launched their joint report, Advancing Manufacturing: Exploring the human element of the journey.

The report illustrates the opportunities and challenges faced by manufacturing organisations in Queensland as they progress toward Industry 4.0, with a focus on the people in the frontline of the change. The report also includes case studies of two organisations, Watkins Steel and our industry partner, B&R Enclosures. The research was completed by our research program leads, Dr Penny Williams, Prof Greg Hearn, research Associate, Dr Rio Rodrigues PhD and Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Melinda Laundon.

The event was held at our Industry partner and key organisation in advancing Advanced Manufacturing in Queensland, ARM Hub (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) and included

•  An introduction to the report and its impact from Jobs Queensland Executive Director, Joshua Rayner
• Q & A with Kimberley Davis, Group HR Manager from B&R Enclosures and Des Watkins Director from Watkins Steel led by Prof greg hearn
• Insight into the research outcomes from Dr Penny Williams
• An introduction to the newly formed, Manufacturing Skills Queensland from CEO, Brett Kapernick
• An overview of the recent projects completed by ARM Hub (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) from Samuel Jesuadian
• A project demonstration from Australian Cobotics Centre Lead Engineer, Dr Dasun Gunasinghe and Centre Director, Prof Jonathan Roberts

Key takeaways included:

🔸 Implementing new technology doesn’t work when people haven’t been involved in the development, design and implementation.
🔸 Multidisciplinary working is vital to ensure holistic solutions that work across all aspects of the business.
🔸 The skills workers are developing are transferrable and can be used across many different industries.
🔸 For Australia to be globally competitive we need to embrace advanced manufacturing.

To learn more, access the reports here: Advancing Manufacturing Skills project | Jobs Queensland

The key to success for the Centre is in our collaboration across disciplines and with our industry partners.

Our demonstrations showcased this and you can read more about each of them below:

• Cobot Task Sharing
• The Shorts Project
• Cobotic Welding
• Gasket Room Visualisation

The projects are only a small example of how cobots can augment the capabilities of workers in Australian manufacturing.

Download the document below to find out more:

Our Demonstration projects

Australian Cobotics Centre researchers presented a number of papers and won a number of awards at the recent 2022 ACRA conference.

The Centre had three papers accepted at the conference:

• “Beyond Pure Technology – The Cognitive and Organisational Impacts of Cobots”, presented by Dr Matthias Guertler. Authors: Laura Tomidei, Nathalie Sick, and Matthias Guertler (University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)); Leila Frijat (Centre for Inclusive Design); Marc Carmichael, Gavin Paul, Annika Wambsganss, and Victor Hernandez Moreno (University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)); and Sazzad Hussain (Centre for Work Health and Safety NSW)
• “Cobots” and manufacturing: A bibliometric study”, presented by Professor Greg Hearn. Authors: Greg Hearn (QUT/ACC, ARM Hub); Gian Luca Casali (QUT Business School); and Nisar Ahmed Channa (Sukkur IBA University)
• “A Novel Passive Grasping Robot Control Framework Towards Vision-Based Industrial Steel Bar Conveyor Removal”, presented by Dr Dasun Gunasinghe. Authors: Dasun Gunasinghe, Gavin Suddrey, Riki Lamont, and James Mount (Queensland University of Technology (QUT)); Fouad Sukkar and Teresa Vidal-Calleja (University of Technology Sydney); and Jonathan Roberts (Queensland University of Technology (QUT))
• “Surface Roughness Measurement of Random Shape Workpieces Using Machine Learning with Computer Vision During Robot Grinding Enabling Full Automation”, presented by Professor Jonthan Roberts. Authors: Jing Peng, Jared Donovan, Glenda Caldwell, Peter Corke, and Jonathan Roberts (Queensland University of Technology (QUT))

The conference includes a gala dinner and Dr Dasun Gunasinghe accepted the ‘Best paper’ award for the paper related to the Shorts project with InfraBuild. Congratulations to all who had a paper accepted and those who won awards.

The ARM Hub (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing) co-hosted a performance event with a difference as part of the official launch of the Australian Cobotics Centre.

The performance was a collaboration between QUT’s robotics Professor Jonathan Roberts , Dr Steph Hutchison and Dr Dasun Gunasinghe and was devised to help further an understanding of how people can predict robotic movements, which will help to better integrate people and robots in the workplace. Steph received Australian Network for Art and Technology Synapse residency to co-create the work.

Read more about Steph’s project here: Cobotic Improvisations – ANAT Synapse Residency 2022 – Steph Hutchison & Jonathan Roberts @ARM Hub

The Australian Cobotics Centre hosted the 2022 Australasian Conference for Robotics & Automation (ACRA) from 6-8th December.

Held at QUT’s Gardens Point campus, the conference featured keynote talks from:

• Fabio Ramos (NVIDIA). Principal Research Scientist, and Professor of Robotics and Machine Learning.
• Dagmar Reinhardt (University of Sydney). Practising architect, robotics researcher and educator.
• Gosselin Clément (Laval University). Canada Research Chair in Robotics and Mechatronics.

The conference also included talks on many areas of Robotics and Automation, including:

• field robotics
• robotic vision
• cobotics & industrial applications
• sensors and actuators
• Artificial Intelligence
• and more..

The conference sponsors (Omron, SICK Pty Ltd, Marathon, Emesent and Crown Equipment) also gave industry talks, had display booths and representatives in attendance at the conference.

More information is here: ACRA 2022 – ARAA

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Deputy Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dr Richard Johnson, today officially launched the ARC Training Centre for Collaborative Robotics in Advanced Manufacturing, also known as the Australian Cobotics Centre in front of over 190 people at the ARM Hub in Brisbane.

Led by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the Australian Cobotics Centre aims to create a safer, more efficient and globally competitive manufacturing industry. The Training Centre’s focus on is focused on the implementation of Collaborative Robotics (or cobotics) with research programs that address both the technological advances and the human and design factors that need to be considered when implementing new technology.

Centre Director Professor Jonathan Roberts leads a transdisciplinary team of researchers from QUT (where the Centre is headquartered), University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Swinburne University of Technology who will work in collaboration with industry partners (B&R Enclosures, Cook Medical, Weld Australia, InfraBuild, IR4, TU Dortmund University, ARM Hub (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing)).

 The launch event included speeches from, ARC Deputy CEO, Dr Richard Johnson; QUT Vice Chancellor Prof Margaret Sheil AO; and Centre Director Prof Jonathan Roberts; along with talks from our industry partners and demonstration projects that showcased the work we’ve done so far.

The launch event also included a performance from Dr Steph Hutchison’s ‘Cobotic Improvision’ project via her ANAT Synapse Residency with ARM Hub. Read more about the performance here: Robots and dance combine at ARM Hub – Australian Manufacturing

 

 

Anushani Bibile is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Quality Assurance and Compliance research program at the Australian Cobotics Centre. She started with the centre in late November and will work with the program co-leads to achieve the program’s objectives.

Her PhD research at Monash Microwave Antennas and RF Sensors Laboratory at the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University was based on signal processing for chipless RFID tag detection where chipless RFID technology is a fully passive, printable sensor which is low cost, disposable, compact and environmentally friendly like optical barcodes. She completed her Masters in Mobile, Personal and Satellite Communications in UK.

She also has industry experience in the development of 3D Registration Algorithms for Sparsely Sampled OCT (Optical Coherence Tomography) Retinal Volumes at Cylite Optics in Melbourne. She has been a lecturer of Australian Education Management Group, Melbourne and at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Her research interests are Signal Processing, Image Processing, Chipless RFID and Cobotics.