Exposure to robots - the key to better understanding?

This week I was fortunate to be invited to engage with UQ Liveris Academy students about robotics by my old friends at UQ Business School Tyler Okimoto (leadership guru) and Tim Kastelle (innovation guy also now the Director of the Academy). The Liveris Academy is a collection of some of 澳大利亚昆士兰大学 's best undergraduate students including: Liveris Scholarship students (Chemical Engineering), VC and other UQ Scholars earmarked to be our leaders of the future.

I outlined some of the leadership challenges for companies looking to implement robotics and automation and also detailed the current state of the robotics industry in Australia. I also took the opportunity presented by being in a room of 50 exceptional young people, to find out what they knew about robotics and our robotics industry. Here's what I found:

(1) Students knew many applications of robots across different sectors of the economy, mainly applications with which they had direct experience.

Applications of robots listed by the students included robots for: vacuum cleaning, lawn mowing, coffee making, serving food, stacking shelves, handling lab experiments, parking, pharmacy, surgery, rehabilitation, missile defence, hot metal carriers (smelting), self-driving dump trucks and bubble tea. Sadly, with one exception, these are all robots developed overseas, albeit some with Australian technology inside.

(2) Students had a low level of awareness of the robotics technology developed here and could only name three Australian robots.

The three lucky robots recognised included a robot created from UQ research called the SmartArm (healthcare), the CSIRO "dog" robots (a reference to my old CSIRO Robotics 's legged robotics research) and Boeing's Ghost Bat - the first military combat aircraft to be designed, engineered and manufactured in Australia in more than 50 years

We spoke about the challenges of helping people feel comfortable with the idea of introducing robotics in the workplace, and it became clear that, if our future leaders have experienced such limited opportunities to engage meaningfully with robots, how then can Australian workers be expected to adapt?

Australia is not using robots. At least not very much. Our robot population density (the number of industrial robots per 10,000 workers) in Australia is 75 robots per 10,000 employees, lagging behind the world average of 113, and the #1 ranked country, Singapore, with 918, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

While we may not be adopting robots at the same rate as our peer nations, on the plus side, Australia has been quietly developing robots and related technologies and establishing robotics companies to make use of the abundant talent we produce here (as evidenced by the UQ scholars). Australia has a particular strength in developing technologies associated with a class of Service robots called "field" robots which, unlike industrial robots, can operate in the challenging, unstructured environments that we live in.

Robotics Australia Group was established in May 2020 to represent Australia's robotics industry and to give the industry a "voice". We formed to overcome the challenges of being a young, evolving industry that not many people knew about. While we develop world-recognised robotics talent and technologies in Australia, not many people outside robotics know that we exist.

Exposure has been suggested as a way to positively influence people's attitudes about robots [1], the idea being that the more you have a chance to interact with a robot, the less threatening you will find it and the more you will find ways to use it. There is some limited evidence that interacting with a robot face-to-face elicits more positive feelings toward the robot than does some form of indirect contact such as watching a video of the robot [2].

The lack of robots in Australia, which means that most people do not get the chance to interact with a robot in their workplace, is, I believe, fundamentally holding back our ability to plan for the future and engender the trust necessary to reduce the anxiety people may feel about robotics and automation.

There are only about 85,000 industrial robots in all of Australia, which means, we (humans) outnumber industrial robots by about 300-to-1. And industrial robots are only likely to be seen by the 6.3% of people who work in the Manufacturing sector. We need to see a serious increase in the number of robots across all sectors of the Australian economy to give the other 94% of the working population a better understanding of robots in general and the impact robots are likely to have on jobs.

Robotics Australia Group have proposed a range of initiatives to the National Robotics Strategy that would see a significant increase in Australia's robot population density, for both industrial and service robots used across all parts of the economy. This will support both our native robotics industry, and also help us prepare for the anticipated high-paying jobs of the future.

With Australia developing its first National Robotics Strategy, my hope is that in twelve month's time, if I ask a bright young crop of future leaders to tell me what they know about robotics and how they are used in Australia that we will run out of time to hear all the answers.

[1] Bartneck, C., Suzuki, T., Kanda, T.?et al.?The influence of people’s culture and prior experiences with Aibo on their attitude towards robots.?AI & Soc?21, 217–230 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-006-0052-7

[2] Naneva, S., Sarda Gou, M., Webb, T.L. et al. A Systematic Review of Attitudes, Anxiety, Acceptance, and Trust Towards Social Robots. Int J of Soc Robotics 12, 1179–1201 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00659-4