Sections of Australian manufacturing have copped successive blows in recent years, but the CSIRO says it is working on solutions to guarantee their long-term viability.
The Commonwealth science body says new robotics and computer technologies have the potential to put manufacturing on a sustainable footing while at the same time securing the jobs of Australian workers.
The past five years have not been kind to Australia's manufacturing sector. Official figures show more than 100,000 jobs were lost between 2008 and last year alone.
However, the CSIRO has today released a white paper it says may offer a solution, using robots and computer technology.
The Commonwealth science research body says it is not proposing complete automation that entirely replaces workers.
"The idea here is we're looking to be able to support the current manufacturing workforce by improving their skills," said one of the report's authors, Peter Kambouris.
He says while robots have traditionally been used for mass production products like car manufacturing, new technology has broadened the opportunities.
"Robots do things, some things, quite well. People do other things quite well. We're looking to exploit what a person does well, which is their ability to be flexible, identify small changes in orientation and then make the change for that. Whereas machines and robots are very good at say bringing things from A to B," Dr Kambouris added.
He says computer applications currently used in other industries could also be adapted.
"With the technologies we had previously developed for the agriculture and mining sector, we saw an opportunity to put in assistive type robotic and augmented reality solutions that would help the worker improve their productivity by reducing product errors then by also improving product quality, but also improving safety," Dr Kambouris said.
He says Australia is in a unique position to capitalise on the new technology, particularly through its small and medium-sized manufacturers.
"While other economies are looking to bring in automation to reduce costs in their mass production areas, Australia and a number of our SMEs [small and medium enterprises] are actually ideally set up to do mass customisation," Dr Kambouris said.
"That is they'll have very low runs, generally of higher value-added products, but because of the distribution of products they make it's uneconomical for them to have any fixed automation in place."
However, the fruits of this work are likely to be restricted to supplying areas such as mining, in the initial stages at least.
Dr Kambouris says, while the computer technologies could be at work in real factories within months, the robots are a longer-term prospect.
"Where we're able to put not only a voice command but also project someone's hand gestures through wireless communications, so you have an expert assisting a worker doing either a complex assembly or quality control or maintenance task," he explained.
"Other thoughts that we'll have in this initiative will take a little longer to develop. We're only really at the start of this thought."