QCR PARTNER NEWS

AUSTRALIAN COBOTICS CENTRE NEWS

The 31st August marked one year of operation for the Australian Cobotics Centre and to celebrate, they shared key achievements and highlights from the past 12 months on LinkedIn and updates on industry partner projects:  

• The Shorts Project with InfraBuild,  

• Cobotic Welding,  

• and the newly started project with Cook Medical which explores how cobots could assist in Stent Manufacturing.  

The team are now preparing for the official launch of the Centre by the Australian Research Council in December 2022. The launch event will be part of the program for the 2022 Australasian Conference for Robotics & Automation (ACRA 2022) which the Centre is hosting at QUT. Key dates and information can be found here

QUT ROBOTICS CLUB NEWS

CARECon 

CARECon 2022 (named after the four clubs who worked hard to organise the event, Code Network, QUT Aerospace Society, QUT Robotics Club, and Electrical Engineering Student Society), was the first event of it’s nature held by engineering clubs at QUT. The challenge to make an easily accessible industry event, with a wide range of industry areas to cater to a wide range of interests, was certainly an undertaking, but a raging success. The event featured a trade floor full of industry tables, where representatives could network and advertise to students using resources and demos, a presentation room for companies to dedicatedly talk about what they do, and a Q&A room, for students to understand more of the representative's perspectives on Industry 5.0, life after university, and more. In total, CARECon welcomed at least 170 students, including both dedicated members and non-members, 35 companies and 70 industry representatives, all of whom sung high praises of the work put in to develop an event of this calibre.  

CARECon invited the four club’s sponsors, including Boeing, Watkins Steel, QUT Centre for Robotics, KJR, Tritium, BPEQ, Tanda, Rio Tinto, Technology One Microsoft, Labrys, as well as many other international and local businesses, ranging from IT specialists, cloud computing, automation, robotics, manufacturing, drone, and aerospace engineers and more. The incredible keynote speech was also done by Sue Keay, one of QUT’s Leading Roboticists and Robotics Technology Lead at Oz Minerals, on Industry 5.0. The event has nurtured connections between students and industry and given students an opportunity to network and learn new skills, as well as fostered connections between industry themselves. The open style of the trade floor also allowed companies such as Australian Droid and Robot and BIA5 to bring some incredible demos in the form of their Supersonic UAV and tanks respectively.   

Not only did the event highlight the spirit of the clubs in the ways that they strive to benefit their members, it also highlighted the incredible community of the club executives who work hard to put on events such as these. These students worked tirelessly for months to organise industry, book rooms, allocate tables, create media content to advertise and display at the event, and set up and pack down. Events like CARECon are a reminder of the incredible QUT community, and the way that students, staff and industry alike seek to support each other. CARECon 2023 is already in the works, and all are excited to see what the CARE Clubs will do.  

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In 2022, the QUT Robotics Club ran their most successful Droid Racing Challenge (DRC) since COVID-19, with teams flying in from New South Wales to compete, as well as local Queensland universities including QUT, UQ and Griffith getting involved. 13 teams competed from 7 universities, with 21 teams actually preparing for the event. DRC gave these teams an opportunity to demonstrate their robotics skills and stretch the theoretical knowledge learnt in their degrees in an easily accessible competition. This year stretched us further than ever before, as we welcomed two high school teams from QASMT, who performed admirably for a university level competition.  

DRC features little red droids autonomously racing around a racetrack, with the aim of getting the fastest time. Competitor’s computer vision skills are tested by having to follow the blue and yellow lines marking out the track, as well as avoiding the purple obstacles and other red cars. The event stretches over two days, with the first being testing day for the teams to get a feel of the track. The winning track team, Griffith Golds, from Griffith University, spent this day running their robot through a machine learning algorithm, stepping their way through the track so that the robot could ‘learn’ what the track looked like. This resulted in their robot racing incredibly fast on the competition day, where competitors had three chances to race through the day. Their robot had a record time of 19 seconds and successfully navigated the challenging hairpin bend that featured on the tracks.  

The event was also streamed with the help of a QUT eSport Community Leader, to give viewers at home a chance to cheer on their teams. These streams allow the club to have a wider reach than just QUT, and even inspire viewers to pursue robotics. On Open Day, a young primary school child informed us that he had watched the competition, and expressed his interest in the robots, even telling us that he wanted to study mechanical engineering at university. Events like DRC are powerful tools to inspire the engineers of tomorrow, and the QUT Robotics Club treasures each chance we get to do this. 

This year, DRC featured two smaller tracks to enable teams to have more time on the track and to facilitate the increase in teams if all managed to come, which was designed specifically to be quickly modified into a larger track. This was a major success, resulting in a smooth and easy competition. As well as the technical part of the competition, we had the pleasure of welcoming the creator of DRC, Lachlan Robinson, the 2016 Projects Manager and 2017 Treasurer, and two of QCR’s amazing Chief Investigators, Dr Chris Lehnert and Dr Tobias Fischer, to judge the robot’s designs, as the teams work hard to create mechanically, electrically and stylishly impressive robots. We also welcomed Dr Stephen Hausler to present on autonomous navigation. The Best Design award was presented to DRC’s Most Wanted from the University of Sydney Robotics Club, the Organiser’s Choice award presented to Protobot, also from USyd, and overall, Team Kannonbolt from University of New South Wales CREATE took home the crown. 

As well as a chance to have some friendly competition, DRC is an excellent time to foster the relationships between University Engineering Clubs. The QUTRC executive team had the chance to talk to another university about how they’re managed and give them some ideas on how they could start their own club. Overall, DRC 2022 was a massive success, highlighting the incredible work of both the organising committee and competitors. 

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