At ABB's Robotics Value Provider Conference in Vietnam earlier this year, Applied Robotics received the SOMA Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to one company each year across ABB's South Africa, Oceania, Middle East and Asia region.
This recognition from ABB, arriving in Applied Robotics' 40th year, reflects the depth of the partnership's achievements.
I caught up with Dr Paul Wong, the founder and technical director of Applied Robotics to discuss our long association. In 2005, when I first met Paul, I had asked him about his approach to the market. Typically, most of ABB Robotic’s partners were focused on developing standardised solutions, but Paul had a different answer:
“We do things that nobody else will do.”
I knew that this was a brave ambition in a small market. It turned out to be the start of a partnership that would span decades and produce some of the country's most technically ambitious automation projects.
An inventor at heart
Paul's willingness to challenge assumptions had been building long before that first meeting. At an ABB event in Sweden, he described an idea to one of ABB’s R&D experts: using conveyor tracking to drill large holes in plastic pipe while it was still being extruded. The engineer said it wouldn’t work. Three months later, Paul showed me a working system he had built himself.
Applied Robotics’ strength is creative thinking combined with engineering capability. They look for the best solution, not just the most straightforward one, even if that requires coming up with something completely new.
A world first for an Australian icon
When Arnott's decided to automate the packing of their assorted biscuit lines, they first approached machinery suppliers in Germany and Switzerland. Both said the variation in biscuit shapes, sizes and fragility made robotic handling seem impossible.
Applied Robotics developed a new concept built around robotics and machine vision. The system integrates more than 50 ABB robots and 64 vision systems, processing up to 105 biscuits per second and verifying the quality, cream distribution and structural integrity of each biscuit.
The project coincided with ABB's launch of a new compact, high-speed robot, precisely suited to the confined spaces and rapid movements the application demanded.
The timing was perfect. If we hadn't had that robot in our range, I'm not sure it would have worked the way it did. At the time that was our largest single food and beverage automation project in the Southern Hemisphere. The system has been running in Australia since 2012, and it's still packing the assorted biscuit varieties on supermarket shelves today.
Building the future
Forty years on, the conversations between ABB and Applied Robotics still start with a problem that looks too hard. It's remarkable how many projects we’ve worked on together that have never been done before.
“Our vision is to transform Australian industry into a globally competitive manufacturing powerhouse,” says Paul. “By leveraging advanced automation technologies, we can help local manufacturers not just survive but lead in the global market.”
I share that optimism. In particular, construction is a sector facing a new wave of transformation in Australia. The Building Industry is chronically under automated. With the housing shortage and labour pressures, sooner or later there'll be massive changes in how we build things here. Applied Robotics is already active in this area.
Applied Robotics has partnered with ABB Robotics because we are one of the world’s leading robotics companies, and the only company with a comprehensive and integrated AI-powered portfolio covering robots, cobots and Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs), designed and orchestrated by our value-creating software.
ABB Robotics is at the forefront of developing and commercialising a new generation of Autonomous Versatile Robotics (AVR), leading a global innovation ecosystem of partners in advancing efficient hardware and intelligent software with industrial performance. The business employs approximately 7000 people.
