UAP is a Brisbane headquartered company that manufactures public art, custom architectural facades, and design furniture for leading artists, architects and designers around the world. The complexity of designs that artists, architects and designers now demand push the limits of what is feasible to manufacture with traditional fabrication techniques. 

To meet this demand and ensure future competitiveness, UAP has invested in a 5-year Design Robotics project with the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC). This project is to investigate how robotic vision could be applied to its manufacturing processes, to make them more cost effective and allow for new kinds of art and design objects to be created.

The first problem that robotic vision is addressing for UAP is to allow for robotic polishing of metal sculptures after they are removed from a sand mould. This is a labour-intensive, dangerous and boring job that is currently difficult to automate because of the unpredictable shapes involved. Unlike in mass-manufacturing, where the actions of the robot can be programmed ahead of time, in UAP’s manufacturing processes the items are often completely unique with no pre-existing computer file that describes their shape. Robotic vision is required to build an accurate model of the cast metal object that can be used to drive the polishing process.

Already UAP are reshoring work back to Australia from China due to the cost benefits associated with scanning and robotic technology. 50 hours of robotic operation allowed 800 labour hours to be re-shored back to Australia.