The Next Robotics Race is On: Is Australia Ready?
By: Elliot Duff
Tags: Australia, Employment, Robotics

This article was triggered by an article written a few months ago by the Boston Consulting Group: Robotics Outlook 2030: How Intelligence and Mobility Will Shape the Future and the forecast that:

Professional services robots will dominate the sector. Currently only a bare sliver of the market, professional services robots will have sales that may be more than double those of conventional and logistics robots. We expect the global robotics market to climb from about $25 billion this year to between $160 billion and $260 billion by 2030, with market share for professional services robots hitting up to $170 billion and industrial and logistics robot sales topping off at about $80 billion.

For many of us — we have been waiting to hear this for more than 20 years.

The first robotics race, starting 60 years ago, was to build industrial robots. This was a race for nations who needed robots to help build “planes, trains and automobiles”.

This was not Australia’s event.

Our event is Professional Service Robots.

We need robots for our “Mines, Farms and Defence⁰”

But is Australia Ready?

To answer this we need to look into the current situation.

A robot is defined as an actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks. Autonomy in this context means the ability to perform intended tasks based on current state and sensing, without human intervention.¹

Robots are often described in term of two classes: industrial robots (robots for use in industrial automation applications) and service robots (robots that performs useful tasks for humans or equipment excluding industrial automation applications). Service robots can then be split into two sub-classes: personal and professional. And professional service robots can be split further into different application domains of inspection, cleaning, construction, logistics, medical, rescue, defence and field robotics. Field robotics includes mining, agriculture and space; hence it dominates research in Australia.

Whilst Australia has been a global leader in field robotics research for many decades,² we have not been able to translate this success into the creation of a large-scale robotics manufacturing industry. This failure compromises our sovereign capability in the products and services that underpin our critical industries, such as mining, agriculture and defence,³ and fails to realize the value that could be created by building export-focused manufacturers (e.g., space and disaster tech)⁴ in areas where Australia has competitive advantage (i.e., knowledge workers to exploit the higher value-added segments on the Smiling curve).⁵

Australia’s inability to translate research into products is a well-known and complex problem — often referred to as the innovation imperative.⁶ It combines a lack of ambition, a failure to collaborate, limited access to venture capital, poor economic complexity and most noteworthy, the absence of any industry representation.⁷ Whilst some of these weaknesses have been addressed in recent times with the creation of the Robotics Australia Network , one of the most significant challenges which still remains is the ability of our SMEs to scale and access global supply chains. There are many examples, where SMEs have been forced to move overseas in order to grow or to be acquired by multinationals.

With advent of digital technologies, there is no technical reason why robots designed and built in Australia could not service a global market. But contrary to expectation, rather than digitalization leading to the democratization of technology across the world, it has instead led to the agglomeration of innovation. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the migration of skills, companies and capital to innovation clusters such as Silicon Valley.⁸ However, COVID-19 has the potential to reverse this trend — because governments world-wide now recognised that manufacturing is a sovereign capability that needs to be nurtured and protected. In Australian this has led to Australia’s Modern Manufacturing Strategy — which robotics and automation play a critical and sovereign role.

Robot Field Testing

Critical to the successful development and deployment of commercial field robots is extensive testing. Testing under a variety of environmental conditions — often over extended periods of time and sometimes over large distances. Historically this testing has been conducted on private sites (mines, farms) — it is only recently that public/shared test sites have been made available.

“Australia is a great test-bed for robotics and automation with our vast land mass and low population density, where robots are ideally placed to take on many dirty, dull and dangerous tasks. Our unique geography has led to the development of world-leading field robotics applications. In addition, many of Australia’s regulatory regimes are exemplars for the rest of the world. This provides us with an opportunity to exploit these strengths by developing Australia as a test bed for new technologies taking advantage of our first mover advantage in many areas to develop a true robot economy to benefit Australia.”⁹

Impact for Australia

The question to be asked is what impact will this growth have on Australia, or more importantly, what is the impact if we cannot realize this growth.

Unfortunately, robotics is not referred in the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO) which makes it very difficult to accurately assess the employment figures for robotics in Australia. Employment in robotics is scattered across a variety of industries: manufacturing, mining, agriculture and professional services. In 2018, a web-based survey by the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision identified more than 1,100 companies within Australia that broadly encompass activities in robotics (i.e. producers, distributors, system integrators and advisors). Publicly available data suggests that 442 of these “robotic” companies employ almost 50,000 Australians and generate more than $12 billion revenue each year.

Using this as base number, we can estimate the potential growth of employment in robotics based upon the GADR for each sector. This ranges from 9.5% for defence, 25% for agriculture, 27% for mining and agriculture, to 41% for Professional Robotics Services.

Averaged over next 5 years, there is a potential growth of 100,000 jobs and an additional $40 billion in value.

This growth can be supported by several examples. In Australia we have a company like Emesent, which have grown from 7 employees to 100 in two years. Overseas, we have the example of the Odense Robotics Cluster, which has grown by over 8,500 people in five years.

What Now

To take advantage of the unprecedented growth in professional service robotics we need to rapidly accelerate the scale and number of robotic SMEs in Australia. For it is the SMEs that translate ideas into action, manufacture robots, employ people, and create wealth. To do this, we need to do more than collaborate, we need to aggregate all the fantastic capability that we have across our country and direct it towards this goal — of creating a vibrant, competitive and sustainable robotics industry here in Australia.

We need to prepare for the race ahead.