Professor Craig, IFAC President
Delegates

A warm welcome to Cape Town and to South Africa. It’s a pleasure to be here this evening.

This is the first time that Africa has hosted this prestigious congress, and I am pleased to welcome you home to the Cradle of Humankind.

It's a privilege and an honour to address a world congress with such an impressive line-up of scientists, academics and executives of large and small robotics companies all keen to keep abreast of new technologies, ideas and innovations. I am proud to welcome you to our country.

As some of you may know, this year 2014 we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections. It is an important milestone – not only for all South Africans – but also for our global friends and partners who have been steadfast allies in our struggle for freedom and democracy.

Over the past twenty years, science and technology, has been at the heart of the South African Government’s national growth and development strategies. Science has played a decisive part in addressing the unacceptable inequalities and divisions in our society. For example, South Africans excluded from basic services during apartheid now enjoy access to electricity, clean water and sanitation – boosted by the benefits of technology-transfer programmes. Affordable health services and education are now available to the majority of South Africans leveraging for example e-health and e-education platforms. Our investment in Information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure not only narrowed but in many instances effectively bridged the digital divide, ensuring that the information society is not an opportunity for a privileged few.

Science also contributed decisively in less tangible but nevertheless equally important ways. Winning the bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, for example, filled South Africans with pride and did as much to foster national unity as winning the rugby World Cup in 1995. Big science is beneficial to any society in transition such as ours.

International partnerships have done much to bring South Africa back into the fold of the commonwealth of nations.

During the past twenty years science cooperation with Europe, America and Asia has played a valuable part in facilitating South African scientists’ integration into the global community following the isolation of apartheid. Through multiple training, mobility and networking programmes, international partnerships actively contributed to human capital development for science and technology in South Africa. These are partnerships we greatly appreciate. If South Africa today has a vibrant national system of innovation, with knowledge production consistently on the increase, this is no small part due to international cooperation.

Following our recent elections, the South African Government is currently preparing a programme of action for the next five years, to realise the vision of our National Development Plan (NDP), tackling the interlinked challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Science, technology and innovation constitute a critical part of this response. We are for example committed to working towards achieving a national investment of 1.5% of our Gross domestic product (GDP) in research. In achieving that target international cooperation will continue to be a priority for us, with a special focus on reinforcing Africa’s science, technology and innovation capacities.

There are many things that we generally take for granted in our lives that we could actually live without, even things that we have become quite dependent on, like cellphones, electricity in our homes, and fossil-fuel-driven vehicles. Only a few generations ago we had none of these things, and the human population not only survived but expanded. Now there are almost 7 billion of us, still growing, and placing enormous demands on our planet's limited resources, particularly in respect of the two things we cannot do without: food and water.

Without clean, safe water, people can survive only a few days. We can survive longer without food, but people who don't have sufficient quantities of the right kind of nourishment live in a state of constant preoccupation with getting sustenance for themselves and their families, and their full human potential can never be realised. This is how over a billion people in the world today exist, including many in South Africa.

Most of you here will probably say that we can't live without robots and that the more robots we build and the more sophisticated they are the better we will all be. Of course, reality is more complex. But a politician's fear is always that new technologies will lead to fewer rather than more jobs. There is evidence for less displacement of labour and less disruptive innovation in the current landscape of automation. I think more of smart tools to assist rather than displace workers. I think also of the research that has gone into studying the productivity gains from different types of automatic activity.

What we are seeing is a displacement of the industrial robots, familiar from Asimov books and the Terminator films, by mobile robots. It's a world-wide phenomenon. Desktop computers are being replaced by tablets. Workplaces are also becoming mobile. We talk to robots and they do things for us. I'm afraid I have never been able to get Siri to do what I want on my iPhone, but I have learned how the transcribe an oral message.

We live in an exciting new world in which smart fabrication has come into its own. Miniaturisation and smart and lightweight materials make for small, light, smart robots. We can send satellites the size of a loaf of bread into space.

In South Africa most of our universities are researching one of the other aspects of automation. But we don't have robotics companies that the world leaders in technology like Google are snapping up for a billion dollars here or there. However, we do have the Council for Science and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The CSIR is our oldest and best-known science council. It was built in the immediate post-war period to promote the development and assimilation of new technologies. It is the biggest and best-resourced science laboratory complex in the country. It accounts for 15% of government expenditure on research and development. Recently the CSIR adopted water sustainability, health, and safety and security as areas of integrated research and innovation. These three integrated research and innovation areas are in addition to the six already established research-impact fields of industry, built environment, health, natural environment, defence and security, and energy.

The CSIR has a Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems group with a staff of 22 (some of whom are attending this conference) working on finding robotic solutions to South African challenges. The group has four research areas –perception, planning, navigation, machine learning. Its projects are carried out in the areas of mining robotics, “mule” robotics (unmanned cargo carrying ground vehicles), intelligent manipulation and active vision for autonomous systems.

Some of our mines are kilometers deep. Using robots to do work underground makes sense. Robots won't replace workers, but they will increase safety. A Mine Safety Platform was recently completed and “BBC world news horizons” filmed an early prototype in an episode. The episode is worth viewing for an insight into a South African mining environment.

The technology and capabilities developed for the mine safety platform are building blocks for autonomous robots in other applications. They can also be used as building blocks for systems that can be used for mining at extreme depths where it isn’t safe for humans (due to high temperatures and physical constraints for example steep angles and confined space).

Professor Craig, delegates, I want to conclude by making this statement. South Africa supports science, technology and innovation in Africa. We both support and need support in return. Just as South Africa needs strong and reliable partners in Africa, as well as robust and dynamic frameworks for regional integration and cooperation, so too does South African science. We cannot thrive in isolation. We are doing our best to promote a vibrant African research and innovation system.

So we look for international cooperation to support science and technology capacity-building elsewhere in Africa. We are also developing a series of bilateral partnerships with other African governments, which will involve the co-funding of research by both governments.

South Africa will be one of the champions for the new Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA) adopted by African leaders at the July 2014 African Union Assembly. STISA will focus Africa’s science, technology and innovation investment in six socio-economic benefit areas: one, eradicating hunger and ensuring food security in Africa; two, preventing and controlling disease, and ensuring human welfare in Africa; three, improving intra-African communication, through investing in physical and digital infrastructure; four, protecting Africa’s natural resources; five, building African communities, addressing aspects such as democratisation, urbanisation and conflict resolution; and six, creating wealth for Africa. Science is indeed at the heart of the AU’s Agenda 2063.

These are exciting times for science in Africa. Much is expected but so much more can be done.

Let me conclude with this quote from the Economist:

“For most part, robots are not replacements for humans; they are better seen as extensions. Humans can come together to do things they cannot do alone; in future they will increasingly come together with robots to do things they cannot otherwise do so easily, or in some cases at all.”(Economist special report: Rise of the Robots)

We can only hope and pray.