Inside the University of Canberra’s robotics laboratory. Photo: James Coleman.
Who would have thought that getting a robot to pose for a photo would be so hard?
I’m visiting the Collaborative Robotics Laboratory at the University of Canberra (UC), and clapping and yelling at ‘Pepper’, the lab’s resident Japanese-anime-style humanoid robot to get her looking my way for a photo. She seems to be deliberately ignoring me.
Late last year, Pepper wowed experts from across the country by contributing – intelligently – to a debate on the future of robotics and AI at Questacon.
“Pepper weighed in on both sides of the argument, impressing the audience with its comprehension skills and cogent responses,” UC reported in December.
“We’re just here to help carry the load,” Pepper said during the debate, talking of her ‘species’.
“We’re a work in progress.”
We’ll let her off on the photo-posing thing then.
UC’s robotics lab was founded in 2017 and is headed up by Professor of Robotics and Art Damith Herath, who came from a robotics start-up in Sydney.
“We are really an interdisciplinary lab, so we actually work with people studying everything from engineering to psychology, finance, art, all sorts of things,” he says.
“We try to understand how humans and robots can work together at different levels, so that can be concierges to ones that go around restaurants, waiting, or cleaning in hospitals … All these projects are looking at real-world applications.”
Xing Wang, Damith Herath, Maleen Jayasuriya and ‘Pepper’ inside UC’s robotics laboratory ‘examination room’. Photo: James Coleman.
Later this month (22 March), they’ll be talking about the role robotics can play in harvesting fruits and vegetables during the Harvest Day Out festival at Lanyon Homestead.
The team will bring along an apple-harvesting robot they designed and built a couple of years ago, and put it to work in the homestead’s orchard.
“I’ll be talking about how a robot can do autonomous apple harvesting in the natural environment, and how soft robotics can help humans,” fellow researcher Xing Wang says.
These robots are designed to sort through textiles. Photo: James Coleman.
Ripe fruit – being famously soft – and robots – famously made of metal and consisting of many hard parts – mean the technology requires Xing’s touch.
“Xing’s expertise is in soft robotics, which is making malleable material like tentacles and grippers for handling soft materials like fruits,” Damith adds.
The lab has had plenty of practice in this sort of thing.
The team is currently working on robots that can use cameras and sensitive ‘fingers’ to sort textile waste as part of a deal with clothing brand Country Road.
They’re also coming up with solutions to save humans from the dirtiest of the work at GoTerra, a Hume-based food-waste processing plant.
Experimenting with picking up food waste. Photo: James Coleman.
At the moment, workers must manually sort through the conveyor belts of food waste – picking out things like plastic containers and fruit netting. It’s the stuff of nightmares – brown and sludgy and disgusting.
“The smell sticks to your clothes,” Damith says.
“It’s really cutting-edge because no one has really looked at this type of problem. And it’s such a complex problem because everything is mushy.”
The work is still in the experimental stage for now, with the team perfecting what sort of ‘fingers’ the robots need to pick out the waste.
The sort of robot that will be put to work at GoTerra in the near future. Photo: James Coleman.
Meanwhile, the likes of Pepper form the basis for deeper, more psychological experiments.
For instance, the room where we’re attempting to photograph her is the lab’s ‘examination room’. There’s a table and chairs set up in the middle, cameras and microphones everywhere, and one of the walls is a two-way mirror to allow for observation from outside.
“We work a lot with the Faculty of Health and School of Psychology to run psych experiments where our researchers can sit on the other side of the two-way mirror and watch and study how people interact with these robots.”
Several of the robots in the lab are ready to work as waiters or cleaners. Photo: James Coleman.
The future of robotics isn’t scary to Damith.
“Robots have mostly been locked away in factories for the past 20 to 30 years, building our cars and TVs, but now we’re in this phase where in the next 10 to 20 years, we’ll start seeing them in regular life interacting with people in more social settings.
“It doesn’t mean robots are actually going to replace humans. It’s more of a collaborative thing. Robots are tools that improve efficiency at the end of the day, like your smartphone. Some of your intelligence is actually now in your smartphone, if you think about it.
“That’s where friendly looking ones like Pepper come in.”
Once you get her to look at you.
Register for 2025 Harvest Day Out on 22 March at Humanitix.
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