“The opportunity to experiment with a robot-like Chip in a real-world environment such as Sydney Airport is unique, even on a global scale. It is also incredibly valuable, as it allows both corporates and academics to contribute to the growing field of research in social robotics and ensures that both CommBank and Air New Zealand remain at the forefront of disruptive technologies.” – Tiziana Bianco, General Manager Innovation Labs, Commonwealth Bank.

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has a research partnership with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) that helps industry uncover and create new opportunities to design engaging customer experiences with social robots. The Social Robotics Research team in the UTS Magic Lab work with the CBA Innovation Lab in Sydney to design social robot behaviours that solve complex problems for organisations and help to generate competitive advantage.

The social robotics market is expected to be over $US20 billion by 2025.

This unique academic-industry partnership has built a new high-performance world-leading university-industry collaborative capability. This can assist Australian businesses prepare for, and take advantage of, social robotics, with a game-changing disruptive technology poised to disturb trillion-dollar value pools in the global economy.

Social robots will change lives, transform business, and impact every Australian industry. An important area of focus for the partnership is the exploration of safe and secure human-robot interaction using industry-based experiments.

In July 2016, a state-of-the-art, 300-pound security robot at the Stanford Shopping Centre knocked down and ran over the leg of a 16-month-old boy. Knightscope, the company that made the security robot, explained that the robot veered to the left to avoid the child, but he ran backwards, directly in the front of the machine, and fell. It is imperative that people can safely and securely interact with social robots offering services in agile manufacturing, healthcare and transport.