6 Big Challenges to Solve for Australia’s Robotics Industry

Happily, as Sue mentions in the interview, there is movement afoot to create a national robotics network as an incorporated entity to give the robotics industry in Australia a voice. This was an initiative undertaken in response to the Robotics Roadmap for Australia and is a very exciting development. 

The new entity will raise awareness of what’s happening in Australia and challenge some of the negative narrative around robotics technologies. It will also identify capability and connect industry stakeholders from government, academic institutions, research organisations and business. What will you do to engage with this new organisation to support it and the Australian robotics industry as a whole?

2. What investment?

That heading is a little unfair, but it is true that Australia’s investment in robotics is minuscule when compared with other OECD nations’ efforts. There is no doubt this is a multi-layered problem and there is no single panacea but we need to get it sorted … and quickly. The key is to shift our mindset from a short-turnaround software-biassed focus to recognising that robotics technologies involve a longer term play and, given the hardware element, are more capital intensive. But robotics solutions also have a broader base of commercialisation opportunities than most software enjoys. 

If our expectations for technology investment are anchored on our experiences with software technology, the feasibility modelling frameworks will preclude robotics from meeting the threshold. A unique approach to calculating return on investment is required to appreciate that robotics technologies can transcend industry silos and find use cases across a broad spectrum of applications.

Work needs to be done to attract private and public investment in the robotics ecosystem if we are to capitalise on the opportunities our nation currently has before it. Certainly, we need to attract much more venture capital investment but we also need to encourage industry players to think outside their industry silo when considering investment into their own projects. If an enterprise only considers its own application for the development, they are missing the opportunity to monetise the technology elsewhere in the ecosystem. 

Of course, it would be helpful for the government to provide the robotics industry with more effective and accessible tax incentives for R&D activities. But perhaps we could also provide incentives for businesses to think bigger and find additional applications for their IP beyond their own robotics use case? How do we achieve this kind of shift in government, VC and corporate mindset?

3. Coopetition not competition

Robotics technologies have huge potential to be applied across diverse industry use cases. Drones, for example, are being used for ‘just-in-time’ delivery of supplies as well as monitoring the health of the Great Barrier Reef. 

Spot the four-legged robot was recently deployed by Singapore’s National Parks Board to remind park visitors of COVID-19 social distancing rules and was demonstrated in New Zealand a few days later herding livestock.

And, we’ve got 369 autonomous haul trucks currently working mines in Australia and these kinds of remote mining technologies are now being explored by the Australian Space Agency for application on the Moon. 

These are a few examples of where robotics solutions have transcended industry silos. But there are also opportunities for modified versions of robots or individual components, such as actuators and sensors, or programming IP to be commercialised more broadly beyond the intended use case.

To do this, we need a robotics industry ecosystem based on coopetition rather than competition. So, how do we get corporates that are innovating with robotics technologies to play together in the sandbox? How do we get them to engage effectively with startups and SMEs through innovative commercial arrangements? 

How do we encourage our industry stakeholders to think bigger and play for the benefit of the industry as a whole and the future of Australia’s robotics economy?

4. Accessible IP protection and enforcement

Having come from the bootstrap startup arena, I’ve never quite understood the point of protecting your Intellectual Property (IP). To me, it seems counterproductive to spend so much time, energy and money on registering your invention only to have to spend even more time, energy and money on monitoring your competitors and defending your rights if your IP is breached. For a small or even medium sized business, the effectiveness of IP protection and the return on investment are sketchy at best.

Australian patent laws have undergone a recent review and changes were enacted into legislation in February 2020. However, given the outcome of this review, it seems it must be paralysingly tricky to completely modernise a scheme that is fundamentally based on principles that were relevant to the competitive landscape of the 1800s. 

Unfortunately, despite having the opportunity to really shake it up, the recent changes have failed to improve the scheme for those enterprises most likely to be nimble and highly innovative players in Australia’s technology economy. The system remains biased toward big firms that have the resources to dedicate to the IP process. 

Unless the government can come good on providing direct mechanisms to better assist smaller ventures and startups, IP protection will remain a costly and cumbersome exercise and small innovators will be exposed to disproportionate competitive risk. How do we make sure the government implements accessible options for SMEs?

5. A roboticist and a surgeon walk into a lab … 

I was fascinated to hear insights from Dr Nick Hockings, Postdoctoral Researcher also at CSIRO’s Data61, about the need for surgical-level anatomy skills to help progress soft robotics technologies. As a guest on the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Soft Robotics Podcast, Nick spoke about the importance of collating information from the anatomical and polymer materials sciences to advance the development of life-like movement in robotics.

Nick champions the need to have an understanding of anatomy, histology, pathology and surgery in soft robotic design and, as he points out, this is problematic for your average roboticist. The suggestion is, therefore, that soft robotics labs need to hire a proportion of their graduate students with significant professional experience in surgery.

The challenge here, of course, is that any student heading down an educational pathway to be a surgeon is unlikely to be doing so with a view to joining a robotics lab. This is a very real example of where the robotics industry desperately needs seemingly unrelated skills and will need to find creative ways to attract new talent from disparate disciplines. How can Australia break down educational silos to benefit from cross-pollination of skills?

6. Academia vs Research vs Commercialisation

I think we would all agree that any industry, particularly one that relies heavily on innovation, requires the disciplines of academia, research and commercialisation to play in sync. But that our appetite to play together is often undermined by our profession’s unique financial and status-enhancing incentives, which greatly influence our personal motivations.

As I understand it, from colleagues more familiar than I am with academia, a key sticking-point between academics and their research and commercialisation colleagues is that academics are incentivised to publish papers. They are therefore disinclined to delve deeply on one specific issue, preferring to move on to the next topic of enquiry. This isn’t helpful if we need to solve ‘wicked’ problems in order to bring a technology up to a commercially viable standard.

Researchers, on the other hand, are knuckling down to solve these ‘wicked’ problems but often don’t have a definitive commercial application and are not responsible for researching the technology’s commercial viability. Dr Peter Corke, Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics and the Centre for Robotic Vision, gives an insight into his own experience with this: