QUT researchers received the overall Engineering Leadership Award and two category awards in the recent Engineers Australia's 2010 Queensland Engineering Excellence Awards for a landmark construction safety project and a project to integrate unmanned aircraft into national airspace.
As well as the overall Engineering Leadership award, the team from the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre- SBEnrc - (formerly the CRC for Construction Innovation) and John Holland took out the Reports, Procedures and Systems category for the Working Towards a Safer Construction Industry Project.
The Centre's CEO Professor Keith Hampson said the awards were fitting recognition for the portfolio of research and education projects carried out over a five-year period which had resulted in a construction safety program that had been undertaken by approximately 14,000 construction workers.
"The research looked at all aspects of the construction industry and worked with participants from industry, government and other research organisations as well as employers and employees," Dr Hampson said.
"The research team developed three industry toolkits for bringing about safer work sites: Construction Site Safety Culture, Safer Construction and Safety Effectiveness Indicators.
"This research was vital to the industry because workplace fatalities in the construction industry cost the country $3.6 billion a year and it is the 20 to 24 year olds who bear the brunt of safety lapses because they are four times more likely to have a fatal accident than those in other industries."
Dr Hampson said their long-term partners John Holland Group had led the project teams for the three safety projects.
"John Holland developed its Passport to Safety Excellence Program out of the research which has resulted in a dramatic decrease in Workers' Compensation claims," he said.
SBEnrc has begun a new national project Safety Impacts of Alcohol and Other Drugs in Construction led by Associate Professor Bert Biggs from QUT's CARRS-Q and John Holland northern region safety manager Greg Ward.
QUT's Smart Skies project last week took out Engineering Excellence Awards for the Control systems, networks, information-processing and telecommunications category.
Smart Skies is a Queensland-led research and engineering project to investigate a new approach to air traffic management and integrate unmanned aircraft into the national airspace.
Smart Skies project manager Reece Clothier said the project had gone from paper-only concepts through to flight-tested prototypes in less than two years.
"The project is pioneering the use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for bushfire fighting, search and rescue, and agricultural and environmental management," Mr Clothier said.
"Smart Skies is leading the world in the development of the next generation of airspace management technologies. These technologies would provide much greater flexibility in the use of our airspace and could open the skies to new types of airspace users such as unmanned aircraft."
The research conducted for the Smart Skies Project is jointly funded by the Queensland Government, Boeing Research & Technology, Boeing Research and Technology Australia, Insitu Pacific and the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA): a joint-venture between Queensland University of Technology and CSIRO.
Media contact: Niki Widdowson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 1841 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au.
