Australian Cobotics Centre: Safer, More Efficient, Globally Competitive Manufacturing Industry

Australian Cobotics Centre: Safer, More Efficient, Globally Competitive Manufacturing Industry The Australian Cobotics Centre officially opened in August 2021. The Centre is funded for five years as part of the Australian Research Council’s Industrial Transformation Research Program scheme and is focused on collaborative robotics in advanced manufacturing.

The Centre will aim to improve the collaborative robotics capability within Australian manufacturing by training the next generation of manufacturing leaders, researchers, and technicians with collaborative robotics expertise. Headquartered at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), with two other locations at The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Swinburne University, the Centre is expected to build the human and technical capability needed to underpin Australia’s global competitiveness in advanced manufacturing.

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Automation offers a raft of benefits, from improved productivity, quality and repeatability, through to safer working conditions and greater job satisfaction. Increasingly, advanced technology is becoming a critical factor in the success of globally competitive welders, fabricators and manufacturers.

And yet, Australia’s adoption rates lag well behind other advanced economies.

“Australian manufacturing has an opportunity to be more globally competitive by improving manufacturing processes which lower production costs and boost productivity,” said Roberts.

“The Centre will help industry develop its capability for new forms of human-robot interaction in manufacturing environments, especially as Cobots can be used for low-volume manufacturing tasks.

This will benefit Australian companies (who will win on process innovation and lower costs), manufacturing workers (whose jobs will become safer and higher-skilled), and the economy (through the growth of jobs and exports).”

“The Centre was conceived in 2019 when it became clear that Australia’s manufacturing industry were not embracing the opportunity of collaborative robots at the same rate as some of our global competitors,” said Roberts.

As noted in the recent Federal Government report Australia 2030: Prosperity Through Innovation, Australia leads the world in research in cyberphysical systems, computer vision, field robotics, simulation and robotic vision.

And yet, as a nation, Australia’s adoption rates of robotics and automation are well below our international counterparts—Australia ranks 18th in the world in application of industrial robots.

According to Centre Director, Professor Jonathan Roberts, “The Centre has been established to help the manufacturing industry become more competitive globally by solving some of the problems associated with adopting collaborative robots – which we sometimes call cobots. These are robots that can work closely with people and typically in situations where they can help people avoid dangerous or repetitive actions.”

Automation, robotics and collaborative robots (also known as cobots) are changing the way the welding and manufacturing industries work.

According to a recent report commissioned by Google, automation has the power to deliver a $2.2 trillion boost to Australia’s national income by 2030 from productivity gains. This includes $1 trillion boost from accelerating the rate of automation and a $1.2 trillion boost from transitioning Australia’s workforce to higher skilled occupations.

Australian companies adopt automation technologies at less than half the rate of their Swiss and American counterparts. In Switzerland, over 25% of publicly listed firms engage in automation. In the US, over 20% of publicly listed

What is a Cobot?

Cobots are designed to work alongside human employees, assisting employees with work that may be too dangerous, strenuous, or tedious. This helps to create a safer, more efficient workplace without eliminating jobs.

Cobots are easily programmable and are capable of ‘learning’ on the job. In welding, cobots can be used for several purposes, from joining metal parts and holding parts steady for workers, through to sorting hardware using a vision system.

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The Benefits of Cobots Cobots are specifically designed to share the work space with human beings, making automation easier for businesses of all sizes, particularly SMEs. Cobots are generally versatile, lightweight, require relatively little space, and are much easier to program than their industrial counterparts. They can also capture large volumes of data that can be deployed in areas such as predictive maintenance.

Improved Productivity and Profitability Robots and cobots play an essential role in creating lean manufacturing processes, helping reduce or eliminate redundancies, errors, bottlenecks and waste. The right type of technology can help eliminate workflow delays and duplications and accelerate entire processes through the automation of individual tasks.

Superior Quality and Repeatability The integration of cobots into production processes is proven to deliver superior quality outcomes and higher repeatability. Any process that improves weld quality and repeatability is worthwhile. Welding is not just a commodity, or a simple, straightforward process. When welds fail, the results can be disastrous. A poor quality weld can be hugely expensive, and can cause massive damage, injuries, and even fatalities.

Growth in Domestic and Export Markets With increased productivity, quality and repeatability, manufacturers are able to leverage new domestic and export markets. Increases in productivity enable manufactures to deliver on changing customer needs and mass customisation, while maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage.

Safer Working Conditions The use of robots and cobots has the power to improve safety for welders and manufacturing workers. As automation reduces routine, dangerous manual work, workplace injuries are expected to drop by as much as 11%. For instance, the use of robots and co-bots (particularly in confined spaces) helps to remove welders from immediate exposure to welding fumes, ultraviolent radiation, heat and sparks.

Greater Job Satisfaction A move towards the use of robots and cobots will unburden the average Australian of two hours of the most tedious and manual work each week.

Approximately 62% of low-skilled workers will experience improved job satisfaction, and wages for non-automatable work will increase by around 20%. Introduction of cobots into production lines allow businesses to make better use of human skill and innovation, with machines taking over mundane tasks so that employees can focus on critical thinking, quality and creativity.

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firms are engaged in automation. Australia lags far behind, with just 9% of firms actively engaged in automation.

China, Korea, Singapore and Japan are making significant national investments in robotics. The Chinese Government has invested an estimated US$100 billion in robotics, with automation technology a focal point of its strategy ‘Made in China 2025’. When the strategy was released in 2015, China set national goals of producing 100,000 industrial robots a year and having 150 robots in operation for every 10,000 employees by 2020.

In Japan, the ‘New Robot Strategy’ aims to make the country the world´s number one robot innovation hub. In the manufacturing sector, Japan has set robotics adoption rate targets of a 25% increase for large-scale companies and 10% for SMEs. Korea’s Intelligent Robot Development and Supply Promotion Act has legislated the development of the local robot industry as a key component of the country’s fourth industrial revolution.

Clearly, this is a missed opportunity for Australia, particularly when accelerating the pace of automation has so much potential to boost our productivity and economic growth. If Australian companies embraced automation to the same extent as companies in the US, for example, labour productivity growth could increase by over 50% to 2.2% by 2030.

The Australian Cobotics Centre will work to accelerate the pace of the adoption of cobots in Australian industry throughout five research programs.

Research Programs The Centre’s research programs address both the technological advances and the human and design factors that need to be considered when implementing collaborative robotics.

Through this research and its implementation, the Centre will support manufacturers in creating a digitally-capable workforce of the future and a safer, more efficient and globally competitive Australian manufacturing industry.

“Our five research programs and their projects have been designed to maximise collaboration between industry partners and across the universities,” said Roberts.

“The goal of the Biomimic Cobots Program is to allow collaborative robots to mimic humans in acquiring perception and awareness, learning, adaptation, and manipulation skills.”

“The Human-Robot Interaction Program addresses how humans are made aware of the movement and intentions of robotic systems, and will look at how to leverage multimodal interaction, including Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, with robotic systems.”

“The aim of the Designing Socio-Technical Robotic Systems Program is to embed holistic design as a critical factor in creating seamless integration of humans and machines working together to improve human work conditions and environments, and increase effectiveness and efficiencies in production, as well as workforce acceptance.”

“The Quality Assurance and Compliance Program

will develop tools for the specification, capturing, monitoring and evaluation of such a digital thread in human-robot and robot-human collaboration scenarios.”

“The Human-Robot Workforce Program aims to answer research questions associated with: future skills and training needs; design and safety of jobs of the future; managing workplace readiness for the successful implementation of collaborative robotics; and the benefits of greater workforce diversity and longevity,” said Roberts.

Industry Collaboration Professor Roberts leads a multidisciplinary team of researchers from QUT, UTS and Swinburne University of Technology. These researchers will work in collaboration with industry partners, including B&R Enclosures, Cook Medical, Weld Australia, InfraBuild, IR4, TU Dortmund University, ARM Hub (Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing.

According to Geoff Crittenden (Chief Executive Officer, Weld Australia), “Together, QUT and Weld Australia are offering practical solutions to industry that flow from the research undertaken at the Australian Robotics Centre. By participating in the program, companies can expect benefits like access to subsidised advanced manufacturing technology designed to solve specific manufacturing problems, enhanced productivity; increased safety, and minimised employee turnover.”

Weld Australia member, IR4 is one of the industry partners that has already come onboard to leverage the benefits offered by the Australian Cobotics Centre. According to Chris Brugeaud (Chief Executive Officer, IR4), IR4 is involved with Centre

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“

Our business requires an element of R&D activity. Without some sort of support from existing research institutions, we wouldn’t have the commercial justification or imperative—this is a key driver for our engagement in the Australian Cobotics Centre,” said Brugeaud.

because the commercial opportunities and benefits were too great to pass up.

“IR4 provides flexible automation solutions to various market segments that seek to leverage Industry 4.0 technologies, as well as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence,” said Brugeaud.

“What we’ve seen, as we move further into these solutions, is that customer demands related to robotic cells and the role of their operators are ever increasing. So, we’ve been working with QUT for a number of years seeking to understand the opportunities where we could collaborate on cobotic solutions, predominately in defence. The goal was for us to provide our smart automation solutions and QUT to provide the human intent considerations.”

“There was never really a formalised means of how to engage with partners on collaborations such as that between IR4 with QUT. The Cobotics Centre has become the industry leading collaborative partner that brings together organisations with similar intent.”

“Our business requires a significant element of R&D activity. Without some sort of support from existing research institutions, some of the key programs of capability development would struggle to achieve the commercial justification or imperative—this is

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a key driver for our engagement in the Australian Cobotics Centre,” said Brugeaud.

The Centre offers a range of benefits to industry partners: • Access to full range of research projects, outcomes from research including IP that can be used within your field.

• Flexible and adaptive approach to research and its application to mirror the needs of your business.

• Access to international and national experts in the field, free of charge.

• Collaboration with other companies who have similar challenges and the opportunity to work together to learn and grow and adapt to those challenges.

“We are interested in hearing from industry partners who are in different fields to our current partners and can offer a different perspective and experience to the Centre,” said Roberts.

“New industry partners within the Centre would be welcomed and would gain access to the projects already underway, but importantly, would have an opportunity to propose new projects aligned to their business that can draw on the research outcomes of the already established research programs.”

“The PhD students, post-doctoral research Fellows and engineers of the Centre will spend time embedded in their company in order to accelerate uptake of cobotics,” said Roberts.

Further Information If you’d like further details, or are keen to get involved in the Australian Cobotics Centre visit: australiancobotics.org