I am looking forward to witness robotic guardians patrolling our streets and play a small role in shaping the safety of our nation by bringing robots beyond “factory cages” to serve our citizens as trusty laborers.
“I am looking forward to witness robotic guardians patrolling our streets and play a small role in shaping the safety of our nation by bringing robots beyond “factory cages” to serve our citizens as trusty laborers,” said the robotics scientist, who joined HTX in 2019.
The robots, which Dr. Teo and his entourage invent, might not necessarily resemble humans, but have to be designed and configured to accommodate and replicate the complexity of the human process. They could appear as minimal as a steel box, but are actually armed with a myriad of mechanisms within. That is the magic of modern machinery.
So how did the Transformers fanatic come to be a robotics scientist?
An avid collector of Transformers robot figures, Dr. Teo reminisces that his maiden project venture was an inquiry into interactive robotics in his polytechnic days, where he had built an interactive robot.
The passion persisted through to his tertiary years, when he went on to obtain an education at Queensland University of Technology majoring in Mechatronics.
Upon graduation in 2003, he found work with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) and was subsequently awarded a scholarship to pursue a full-time PhD programme.
In his 16 years with A*Star until his appointment with HTX, Dr. Teo had developed various actuators and manipulators capable of carrying out high precision manufacturing processes.
This led him to become the first Singaporean to win the R&D 100 Awards in 2014, the equivalent of the Oscars in the world of scientific innovation.
His invention, which is a breakthrough in precision engineering, is a critical component for developing a parallel robotic manipulator that enables high-precision manufacturing processes.
Dr. Teo’s work in robotics and automation is vital to the future of labour. As our nation faces a shrinking workforce, automating repetitive processes will free up manpower to focus on more meaningful tasks and enable better working conditions.
He has about five projects on his plate, and has been spending a lot of time speaking to and observing officers on the ground across the Home Team agencies to understand their work.
One of those projects involve working on urine screening stations.
Regular urine screening is mandatory for drug supervisees. “It is a repetitive labour-intensive job without much privacy, which may not be a pleasant experience for both the supervisee and our officer,” said Dr. Teo. The challenge, though, is in ensuring that the station is consistently “fool-proof” and able to independently “interact” with a human.
Said Dr. Teo: “Automation today requires substantial human-machine interactions, unlike previous trends, which focus mainly on functionality.”
The robotics scientist is still as enthusiastic about his robot figures today as he was before. Perhaps it is apt for Dr. Teo’s work to be summed up with the Transformer’s thought-provoking tagline: More than meets the eye!