Hon. Steve Whan aces mixed-reality-based control of a cobot
We were very fortunate to have the Hon. Steve Whan, Minister for Skills, TAFE and Tertiary Education and Member for Monaro, for a facility tour of the Robotics Institute this week, together with UTS Vice Chancellor Andrew Parfitt, Dean of Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology Peta Wyeth, Director of Government Affairs and External Engagement Danielle Woolley and UTS Robotics Institute Director Sarath Kodagoda.
The absolute highlight was seeing no hesitation from Minister Whan to wear a mixed-reality headset and use hand-held controllers to professionally operate a collaborative robot (cobot).
While it might seem like an easy task for a human to stack three dice on top of each other, using an MR headset in the virtual world requires a bit of skill for the first-time user to interact with a cobot in the real world – so as onlookers, we erupted in cheering when Minister Whan expertly stacked the third dice in place!
Led by Sarath Kodagoda, the VIP tour showcased skilling and training of students in advanced robotics and our government partnerships. Selected projects included ‘Spot the AI-powered robodog’ (industry partner: Guide Dogs NSW/ACT), ‘pipe robots’ for water pipe and sewer pipe inspection (industry partner: Sydney Water, , ‘soft robots’ used in the ASTRID (Advancing STEM, Technology, Research, Innovation and Deployment) program, a nbn® Australia-University of Technology Sydney partnership to solve real-world problems and enhance the internet experience of our community, ‘bridge robots’ for Sydney Harbour Bridge inspections (industry partner Transport for NSW), and PhD industry training with ‘collaborative robots’ (university partnership: Australian Cobotics Centre).