Queensland’s most senior public servant tours ARM Hub

Director-General of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet Damien Walker toured ARM Hub earlier this week.

As head of the department, Walker leads the Queensland public service. During the visit, the Director-General learned how Queensland innovators are using AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing to design, build and grow more efficiently.

The tour covered four projects that show the range of work under way at Northgate, from aircraft and public art to agriculture and road safety.

Burl Aerospace

Brisbane company Burl Aerospace is developing a new class of vertical lift aircraft to carry heavy and mission-critical payloads into locations without reliable roads, runways or ports.

Helicopters remain limited in how much they can carry, how far they can fly, what they cost and where they can operate. Burl is designing a new rotorcraft architecture that combines commercially available technologies to push past those limits. Its target missions include defence logistics, ship-to-shore resupply, disaster response, infrastructure recovery and remote medical evacuation. Multiple aircraft can also work in parallel, so lift capacity scales with the job.

Burl is building its next-generation rotorcraft at ARM Hub’s 40 Holland Street facility.

UAP

Founded in Brisbane in 1993, UAP designs and fabricates large-scale public art and architectural works for artists, architects and developers around the world. Almost every piece is one of a kind, which makes the work hard to automate. UAP needed robots that could take on repetitive, labour-intensive tasks such as polishing without losing the flexibility custom production demands.

In 2017, UAP began a design robotics research project with QUT and RMIT University, with funding from the Innovative Manufacturing CRC. The aim was to teach robots to see, so they could adapt to designs that change from job to job. UAP opened its factory doors to other manufacturers to share what it learned, and that open approach led to the creation of ARM Hub in 2019.

Critically, automation has also grown UAP’s workforce: for every robot it has brought on, the company has hired four more staff.

QUT banana de-handing project

Separating banana hands from the bunch stalk is physically demanding and potentially dangerous work. In 2022, the Australian Banana Growers’ Council asked ARM Hub to test whether the job could be automated. The $2 million feasibility study is led by QUT Chief Investigator Dr Chris Lehnert, with ARM Hub Director of Industry Research Dr Troy Cordie as technical lead. Hort Innovation, Future Food Systems and Australian Hydraulic Services are partners on the project.

The team built a test cell at ARM Hub that recreates banana shed conditions. The patented system moves bunches off a conveyor, positions them over a tank of water and uses computer-guided water jets to cut the hands from the stalk.

The approach reduces fatigue, gives more consistent cuts and limits the spread of disease. The next stage will focus on edge cases and faster hardware, ahead of field trials and commercialisation.

ProTx Arresta100

Road crews working in live traffic have typically relied on one of two forms of protection. Static concrete barriers are effective but slow to set up for temporary worksites. Truck-mounted attenuators need a worker sitting inside, directly in the path of any vehicle that fails to stop.

The ProTx Arresta100 removes that worker from the crash zone. The seven-metre, two-tonne barrier trailer is towed into place by a standard work ute and deployed in minutes, with no one inside.

ARM Hub worked with ProTx founder John Ferguson to take the Arresta100 from proven prototype to commercial-scale production. That work covered assembly process design, facility layout, procurement and inventory systems, and robotic welding integration.

Thanks for your time, Damien!