UNIVERSITIES, RESEARCH & COLLABORATION began the Centre’s first collaborative project, known as ‘The Shorts Project’. Why use the ACC The ACC works to solve manufacturing problems with collaborative robots — or cobots — in a way that creates a safer, more efficient and competitive industry, and by taking ethical contexts into account.
“The Centre fills a gap for industry by acting as a testing ground for companies’ ideas, allowing firms .... to explore outcomes”
The ‘Shorts’ project: steel manufacturer collaborates on cobot design
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artnering with the Australian Cobotics Centre, steel maker InfraBuild was able to design and test a cobot for production line work, rather than going straight to a robotics integrator. When steel manufacturer InfraBuild approached the Australian Cobotics Centre (ACC) a year ago, they were looking for a collaborative robotic solution to a repetitive and potentially risky manual task. InfraBuild’s production line churns out hot steel bars in a range of shapes and sizes. To remove short,‘off-spec’ bars, the company employs several
people sharing a 12-hour rotating shift to pick out any short items, or ‘shorts’, and throw them off the conveyor. It is intense work, requiring constant focus to reduce risk. InfraBuild was clear about what it wanted: better working conditions for its employees, lower fixed costs, and better product quality and therefore customer satisfaction. “We charge a premium for quality. Customers get upset if they’ve got a slightly short product in their bundle,” says Andrew Thomas, InfraBuild’s Industry 4.0 Program Lead.
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24 | Industry Update Issue 129 November 2022
“Lights and ribbed debar moving on a conveyor can be disorienting, too. There’s not been any major incidents but we are always looking at improving our safety to reduce the potential for an accident.” “Using the cobot, we will save on labour and be even more cost-efficient against imports, and can maintain the premium price because we have the best quality.” Impressed with the development work being done at the ACC’s industrial robot and testing space in Brisbane at ARM Hub (another ACC partner), InfraBuild and the ACC
The Centre fills a gap for industry by acting as a testing ground for companies’ ideas, allowing firms like InfraBuild to explore outcomes, rather than wasting potential time and money by going directly to a robotic integrator without a well-defined project. “Our job at the Cobotics Centre is often to work out how a cobot can perform a task,” says Jonathan Roberts, the ACC’s Director. “If we’re successful or unsuccessful then a company such as Infrabuild can go to a robot integration company, armed with our results, to better inform that company on how a solution might be possible. “Either way, [success or failure] would be a win-win because it lowers the risk of failure for everyone involved.” Testing times InfraBuild’s problem was that off-theshelf solutions to automate the detection and removal of ‘shorts’ couldn’t deal with the variety of bars produced by the steel manufacturer. ACC’s team of engineers and researchers from Queensland University of Technology and
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