Applied Robotics was founded in 1986, forming a partnership with ABB soon after. Over the decades since, the pair have tackled some of Australian manufacturing’s most complex automation challenges, driven by grit, creativity and a shared passion for making things here.
In 2005, Peter Bradbury was ABB’s newly appointed partner manager in Australia. His job was to build a network of integrators. He spent weeks travelling the country asking prospects how he could help. While most were focused on developing standardised solutions, Dr. Paul Wong, founder of Applied Robotics, was one of the last people Peter met, and he had a different answer:
“We do things that nobody else will do.”
Peter had been in the industry long enough to know that this was a brave ambition in a small market. It turned out to be the start of a partnership that would span decades and produce some of the country’s most technically ambitious automation projects.
Paul’s willingness to challenge assumptions had been building long before that first meeting. At an ABB event in Sweden, he described an idea to one of ABB’s R&D experts: using conveyor tracking to drill large holes in plastic pipe while it was still being extruded. The engineer said it wouldn’t work. Three months later, Paul showed Peter a working system he had built himself.
“Just because the people who designed the technology say it can’t work,” Peter says, “Paul just goes and does it himself.”
When a carpet manufacturer needed to stack thousands of carpet tiles per hour, the solution used conventional technology to answer an unconventional question: what if gravity did the work? High-flow vacuum suspends tiles beneath an inverted conveyor belt. Gravity then drops them into precise stacks, ten times faster than conventional methods.
“Applied Robotics’ strength is creative thinking combined with engineering capability. They look for the best solution, not just the most straightforward one, even if that requires coming up with something completely new,” Peter says.
When Arnott’s decided to automate the packing of their assorted biscuit lines, they first approached machinery suppliers in Germany and Switzerland. Both said the variation in biscuit shapes, sizes and fragility made robotic handling seem impossible.
Applied Robotics developed a new concept built around robotics and machine vision. The system integrates more than 50 ABB robots and 64 vision systems, processing up to 105 biscuits per second and verifying the quality, cream distribution and structural integrity of each biscuit.
The project coincided with ABB’s launch of a new compact, high-speed robot, precisely suited to the confined spaces and rapid movements the application demanded.
“The timing was perfect. If we hadn’t had that robot in our range, I’m not sure it would have worked the way it did. That was the largest single food and beverage automation project in the Southern Hemisphere. The system has been running in Australia since 2012, and it’s still packing the assorted biscuit varieties on supermarket shelves today,” Peter says.
As Applied Robotics marks its 40th year in 2026, the Arnott’s project is one chapter in a much longer story. For Capral Aluminium, the team delivered Australia’s first AI-based factory automation system. This intelligent algorithm identifies and nests thousands of unique aluminium extrusion profiles in real time, cutting freight volumes by 50%. For Macnaught, a semi-autonomous assembly cell doubled production output while handling more than 110 product variations.
Across several hundred projects, the vast majority have relied on ABB robots. “We get involved in robot recommendations, simulations and risk mitigation,” Peter says. “ABB RobotStudio is by far the best simulation package available. The models you use in the simulation are the same models inside the robot’s motion controls. What you see is what you get.”
ABB’s extensive robot range spans 88 variants, from a 6.5 kg model with a 30 cm reach to a 6.5-tonne industrial model with a 4.8 metre reach – giving Applied Robotics the flexibility to match the right machine to any application.
At ABB’s Robotics Value Provider Conference in Vietnam earlier this year, Applied Robotics received the SOMA Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to one company per year across ABB’s South Africa, Oceania, Middle East and Asia region.
For an Australian integrator to win it across a region that includes Japan, Korea, India, Malaysia and Thailand, Peter says, is “punching above our weight.” This recognition from ABB, arriving in Applied Robotics’ 40th year, reflects the depth of the partnership’s achievements.
“Our vision is to transform Australian industry into a globally competitive manufacturing powerhouse,” says Dr Paul Wong, Founder and Technical Director of Applied Robotics. “By leveraging advanced automation technologies, we can help local manufacturers not just survive, but lead in the global market.”
Peter shares that optimism. In particular, he sees construction as a sector facing a new wave of transformation in Australia. “Building is chronically underautomated. With the housing shortage and labour pressures, sooner or later there’ll be massive changes in how we build things here.” Applied Robotics, he notes, is already on it.
Forty years on, the conversations between ABB and Applied Robotics still start with a problem that looks too hard.
“What’s remarkable is how many projects we’ve worked on together that have never been done before,” Peter says.
To learn more about Applied Robotics, visit appliedrobotics.com.au
To learn more about ABB Robotics, visit abb.com/global/en/areas/robotics
To explore how creative automation solutions can transform your manufacturing capability, contact our expert team for a discussion.
