Australian innovation includes mealworm snack packs, in-mouth robots and drone weeding – DLIT
Technology has missed very few beats during the coronavirus pandemic, and some of the most adventurous research and development has been happening here in Australia, from quantum computing and the circular economy to insect farming and remote dentistry.
Jens Goennemann, managing director of non-profit industry group Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre, cites medical technologies, batteries and renewables, hydrogen and robot-led farming as areas in which Australia could combine its creative smarts, raw materials and manufacturing capabilities to gain an edge.
He believes the worldwide effort to create COVID-19 vaccines will have a ripple effect through the health industry, too, helping people live “not just longer, but in a better fashion”.
And like many tech advocates, Goennemann is optimistic things will improve with every year. “You just need to look backwards: what has advanced mankind? It’s always been technology.” Here are some of the most interesting developments.
Entomophagy is something humans have done for millennia.Credit:Illustration by Simon Letch
Solar will raise the standard of living around the world.Credit:Illustration by Simon Letch
“Last year, the International Energy Agency said solar now provides the cheapest electricity ever seen, and the cost is still going down,” Green says. “Australia has more rooftop solar than any other country, even not normalising for population, and the average size of the systems is going up.”
Green is director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, where the next generation of “solar” is being developed. He says more powerful home systems will charge electric cars and vice versa, with those cars providing a “bank” of home energy when needed. But he doesn’t see each house being self-contained and off the grid.
“Storage is done most cheaply at the centralised level,” he says. Green believes the revolution will happen “due to economics”, and raise the standard of living around the world. “Solar is the most viable way of getting a reliable electricity supply to the couple of billion people in the world who still don’t have access to it.”
Humans and robots will be collaborating further in the future.Credit:Illustration by Simon Letch
Robots and cobots
The circular economy is on the way and, according to KPMG, it will add more than $200 billion and 17,000 full-time jobs to the Australian economy by 2047-48. And there’s no bigger – and smarter – advocate of the “it’s not waste, it’s a resource” mantra than University of NSW Professor Veena Sahajwalla, a pioneer of micro recycling which creates, as she puts it, “a whole new range of very sophisticated recycling solutions that really didn’t exist before”.
Way beyond turning aluminium cans into more aluminium cans, the future will involve turning raw “waste resources” such as car tyres and beer bottles into high-value products such as green steel and home furnishings. Sahajwalla says the micro factories – buildings with a handful of staff – which her team have designed, with backing from the Australian Research Council, use a range of proprietary techniques, such as thermal isolation, to “unpick” complex structures.
They can therefore extract manganese and zinc from dead batteries, and create filament for 3D printers from mixed plastic structures such as old laser printers. Even more impressively, they can transform fabric into ceramic tiles. “A soft material is now becoming part of a hard, durable green ceramic,” Sahajwalla says. “You’re combining that with waste glass and heat … to create this integrated structure. That’s what we do in our micro factories.”
Robots will allow those in the city to ‘visit’ remote communities.Credit:Illustration by Simon Letch