Commercialisation

One way to ensure Centre research transfers across to the real world is to foster a culture of entrepreneurship.  

Centre Director Peter Corke is the driver of our focus on entrepreneurship, and proactively encourages researchers to keep their minds alert and open to ever-evolving  commercialisation pathways. As a result, the Centre has celebrated four startups emerging from within our team of researchers – LYRO Robotics, Dorabot, AlphaOne.ai,and Cirrus Robotics.

Professor Corke holds advisory roles as Chief Scientist to robotics company Dorabot, advising efforts in Brisbane and coordinating with engineers in Shenzhen and Atlanta. 

In 2019, he became Robotics Advisor to LYRO Robotics which has secured its first international investment partnership with Japan’s Toyo Kanetsu. Based in Brisbane, LYRO Robotics was incorporated in August 2019, and leads the push to create intelligent robots for order fulfilment in warehouses and logistic scenarios in Australia. As detailed in the Centre’s 2018 Annual Report, it was established by a Centre trio – former Research Fellows Jürgen ‘Juxi’ Leitner and Nicole Robinson, and former Research Student Norton Kelly-Boxall.

Additionally, Professor Corke is on a team that established Design Robotics – a collaboration between UAP (Urban Art Projects), QUT, Innovative Manufacturing CRC and RMIT University. It aims to reduce integration time between real-world robotics design and custom manufacturing, and includes the Design Robotics Open Innovation Network as an interface to wider industry.

Another core objective of the Centre is to develop intellectual property that we can license or sell in commercial markets. We have established guidelines and policies on how to manage our intellectual property, along with approaches for open-sourcing some of our technologies. 

The Centre maintains a register of all intellectual property that we develop during the course of our activities, along with any dependencies on background intellectual property. 

Individual researchers assign the intellectual property they have developed to their host university, as collaborating partners in the Centre Agreement. The Agreement sets out the terms of ownership among project parties, who consult with the Centre Executive on protecting and commercialising intellectual property as it is developed. 

In addition to commercialising our intellectual property, we can achieve great impact with our research through our open source policy. In cases where intellectual property we create has low potential for commercialisation, the Centre recommends the ‘BSD-3-Clause License’ created by the Open Source Initiative (opensource.org). 

We believe open source software is increasingly important to broadening the global impact of research results, particularly in robotics and computer vision. As appropriate, we disseminate our research knowledge as open source code (https://bitbucket.org/acrv/) and web-based demonstrations.