Abrasive grit-blasting is regularly used across many industry sectors for the removal of rust, scale, paint and other preparation surfaces. The high-pressure blasting process is an important and necessary maintenance and manufacturing step for infrastructure. Currently this process presents significant health risk to human workers, as it often leads to fine dust, lead-based paint, injury, and fatigue.

With much of Australia’s existing infrastructure (e.g., Sydney Harbor Bridge), it was deemed safe for humans to do the maintenance. However, changes in current workplace, health and safety (WH&S) requirements have now deemed these jobs too dangerous or hazardous for human workers. Hence there is an urgent need for advanced robotic solutions to enable this existing infrastructure to still be serviced and maintained.

New South Wales Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) invested in the development of autonomous robots for removing rust and old paint on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Once placed within a steel structure, a user can simply activate the robot which then automatically senses and explores an unknown 3D environment, builds a 3D map, plans collision-free motion, and performs blasting operations [BBC13, UTS14].

The major benefit of the robots is the drastic reduction of worker exposure to hazardous grit-blasting environments, compared to the existing manual blasting process.  It significantly improves workers’ OH&S by reducing their exposure to large forces, fine dust/paint particles and the dangerous blast stream, while providing operational efficiencies.  The technology has been spun-off through an Australian start-up called Sabre Autonomous Systems for companies in the world to address this growing issue. This demonstrates examples of how Australia can create high quality jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).