POSTED: 31 Jul, 2023

Last week, Centre Director Prof Jonathan Roberts was part of the discusison panel at QUT Centre for Justice‘s Disability & Inclusion symposium.

The panel discussion, entitled ” Inclusion, Technologies and Work”, centred around the inclusive work the panel are doing and how they are bridging HASS and STEMM disciplines to co-create inclusion across diverse sectors.

Jon shared observations from the Australian Cobotics Centre‘s research which shows that the use of cobots in manufacturing will enable the current largely homogenous workforce to be more inclusive of everyone.

The symposium brought together QUT researchers (across the QUT Centre for Justice and QUT Centre for Robotics), and people and organisations, to support Australia’s Disability Strategy (2021- 2031), discussing the barriers and opportunities for supporting inclusion across diverse sectors.

The symposium also provided speakers to share perspectives on their participatory approaches, inclusive technologies, and research that they have co-designed with people with disability.

In addition to his work with the Cobotics Centre and QCR, Jon is also part of the supervisory team of Santiago Velasquez‘s honours project. In this project, Santiago, a guide dog user himself, is using spot from Boston Dynamics as a robotic platform to develop a robot to human guiding interface; similar to a guide dog harness used to communicate between a human and a guide dog, but for future robots.

You can read more about that project here: https://lnkd.in/gN5HyQed