John McCormick and Swinburne’s two humanoid robots (the Unitree G1 and AGIBOT) were featured on ABC News last week, where John shared insights on the growing capabilities of humanoid robots and their potential future role in our everyday lives. The story followed global attention sparked by the impressive humanoid robot performances at China’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala.
Month: February 2026
PODCAST: Voices in Design for Health featuring Jared Donovan
We’re pleased to share that A/Prof Jared Donovan, Chief Investigator in the Australian Cobotics Centre, was recently featured in Episode 2 of the Voices in Design for Health podcast, hosted by Dr Marianella Chamorro‑Koc from QUT.
In this episode, Jared discusses robotics, movement, and what it means to design technologies that feel embodied — offering an insightful look at how design, human experience and robotics intersect.
UTS delivers ACC workshop for Hokkaido University
Our UTS based Quality Assurance & Compliance team recently co‑delivered the No-Code Quality Assurance workshop developed by our Swinburne for the 2025 symposium.
The workshop, led by A/Prof Gavin Paul and Dr Katia Bourahmoune, was part of the Hokkaido University Learning Satellite program, and included a group of PhD robotics students from Hokkaido University and across Sydney.
In just 90 minutes, participants built and deployed a no‑code vision quality assurance workflow—from training a classifier in Teachable Machine to running a vision‑guided pick‑and‑place task on a robot arm.
Welcome to new starter – Bhanu Watawana!
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We are delighted to welcome Bhanu Watawana as a new Research Assistant at Swinburne working with Michelle and Roshan on project 4.7 Cobot Welding.
Research in Focus Series: Jagannatha Pyaraka
We’re pleased to launch our Research in Focus series, featuring the contributions of our Postdoctoral and PhD researchers and the value their work is delivering to Australian manufacturing. As many of our researchers move into the final stages of their projects, this series highlights the outcomes of their work and what comes next.
Our first video features Jagannatha Charjee Pyaraka from Swinburne University of Technology. Jagan started his PhD with the Australian Cobotics Centre in July 2022 as part of the Biomimic Cobots Program and is due to submit his PhD thesis in the coming months.
Jagan’s PhD focuses on developing lightweight learning‑from‑demonstration frameworks, enabling collaborative robots to learn manipulation tasks directly from human demonstrations, even when data and compute resources are limited. His project also included industry placements with Workr and InfraBuild, applying robotics and machine‑learning techniques to real industrial challenges.
Supervisory team:
- Professor Mats Isaksson (Principal Supervisor)
- Professor John McCormick
- Dr Sheila Sutjipto (University of Technology Sydney)
Across his candidature, Jagan has contributed to a broad range of Centre activities, including:
- A peer‑reviewed journal publication in Electronics MDPI (2025) on interaction recognition for robot learning
- Demonstrations at Australian Manufacturing Week (2023)
- Supporting Swinburne’s Industry 4.0 workshops across regional Victoria, delivered through the Victorian Government’s Digital Jobs for Manufacturing (DJIM) program
- Hands‑on engagement with humanoid and collaborative robot platforms in both research and industry settings
To learn more about Jagan’s background, publications, and projects, you can read his profile here: