Australia needs ‘robot reset’

A leading researcher says Australia needs to change the narrative around futuristic robots and what they can do.

Dr Sue Keay with Gizmo the CSIRO Hexapod in the new Robotics Innovation Centre at Queensland Centre for Advanced Technologies. Pics Tara Croser.

Australia needs to reset the narrative on robotics and embrace it — not fear it — according to Data61 director Sue Keay.

Dr Keay, who is the Cyber Physical Systems Research Director at CSIRO'S Data61, told The Australian that robots are incredibly well placed to augment certain human tasks, like those of first responders for example, who provide immediate assistance in the wake of an emergency but are four times more likely to submit a serious workplace claim that any other occupation.

"I think we will get to the point where we can take have reliable robots, teams of robots, who go and assess a situation before we decide if humans need to enter into that situation," she said in an interview.

Dr Keay has just returned from the US, where an Australian team of five automous robots and leading researchers from Data61 competed and placed fifth in DARPA's Subterranean Challenge, an international robotics competition.

The Australian robots worked together to map, navigate and search complex and potentially dangerous underground environments without human assistance, and Dr Keay said the challenge has paved the way for future robotic development.

"We were really pleased with the results and what we learned," Dr Keay said. "One of the main challenges in subterranean environments is that there is no GPS, and so that can make things a struggle a bit. But we were able to develop technology to put communications on-board so that in a disaster or rescue situation, those robots can be of real use."

Speaking to The Australian ahead of the D61+ LIVE event in Sydney, Dr Keay said members of the public can catch a glimpse of the robots at the Carriageworks event. She called for a shift in how we speak about robots, from doomsday predictions to how instead they can help society's future.

"When you talk about robots, people often think about losing their jobs, but when they actually see what they can do they quickly realise that they are just very good at doing particular tasks," Dr Keay said. "They are things that they can do effortlessly in the same way that humans can't, and the humans often end up saying 'oh, is that all?'."

"I think as robots become more common we will find a lot more use cases where robots can augment human capability, and that's exactly what robots should be doing. Not replacing people, just augmenting their capability."

3D printing and machine learning are other key aspect in producing robots for Data61, according to Dr Keay.

"We can prototype different types of robot parts very quickly, and it means we can test them, redesign them, test them and redesign them again," she said. "We're starting to now apply machine learning to work out what materials we should be manufacturing, what shapes the components need to be in, and training the robots to walk or crawl.

"We'll see a lot more robots commonly being used, and it'll be interesting to see the way that users actually adopt the technology and take it to places that the original technology developers never even imagined."