A new five-year agreement between NBN Co and UTS will bring together students, academics and industry experts to tackle challenges facing the telecommunications sector.
The NBN-UTS partnership aims to attract more students – particularly women in STEM - to the telecommunications sector by providing opportunities to work on NBN’s vital national infrastructure. Photo by Oscar Colman.
UTS Robotics Institute Director, Professor Sarath Kodagoda, is on a mission.
“Imagine going inside small ducts with old data cables, and all other things that could be present, to understand what is happening. Are there any blockages, for instance?”
Professor Kodagoda and his team have been collaborating with NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia’s national broadband network, to develop robots that will one day help maintain its vast infrastructure.
“We’re working on what’s called a ‘soft robotics’ solution,” said Professor Kodagoda.
“These robots can grow inside the ducts, utilising the available space and using cameras and sensors to identify potential issues within the network to continuously strengthen its resilience and performance.”
The ‘soft robotics’ collaboration is just one initiative in a 5-year agreement between NBN Co and the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
The partnership is the first of its kind for the telecommunications sector and aims to bring together cutting-edge research and industry insights to solve real world problems and ultimately make the internet experience better for millions of Australian homes and businesses.
“One of the things that excites me about this partnership is that it’s broad-based – it’s able to look not only at the technology itself and what the technology might do or could do. It’s also able to explore what sort of skills are needed to be able to support the technology, whether it’s from a telecommunication provider perspective, or from a user perspective,” said Professor Andrew Parfitt, UTS Vice-Chancellor and President.
NBN Chief Engineering Officer, John Parkin, UTS Professor Michael Blumenstein, and UTS Professor and FEIT Dean Peta Wyeth at the partnership launch in Ultimo. Photo by Oscar Colman.
The joint effort, named ASTRID (Advancing STEM, Technology Research, Innovation and Deployment), will establish a new research team at UTS which will focus on technologies relevant to NBN and deliver impactful outcomes for NBN as well as the wider telecommunications sector.
Professor Michael Blumenstein, Deputy Dean (Research and Innovation) in the UTS Faculty of Engineering & IT, said ASTRID unlocks great potential for UTS and for NBN.
“This partnership is going to be central to the nation’s digital transformation and will boost UTS’s research performance in areas such as telecommunications engineering and computer science, in collaboration with industry and government,” said Professor Blumenstein.
NBN Co predicts that its broadband network will carry three times more data by 2033.
“That pace of change means we need to be ready to evolve our network and continue to develop our capabilities,” said John Parkin, NBN’s Chief Engineering Officer.
The partnership also aims to attract more people – specifically women in STEM fields – into the telecommunications sector by giving students the opportunity to work on a continent-sized piece of vital national infrastructure.