Robert Bird Group has continued its collaboration with Jacaranda Flame Consulting – University of Sydney, giving engineering students the opportunity to work alongside industry on genuine engineering challenges outside their academic programs.
The latest six-week collaboration produced fresh thinking on a familiar industry challenge, while demonstrating the value of giving emerging engineers meaningful exposure to professional practice.
A real-world challenge
The program is designed to expose students to the type of open-ended problems they are likely to encounter in professional practice. Students receive an industry brief and work together to research the problem, test different approaches and develop a practical response.
For the 2026 program, Robert Bird Group Principal Chris Waite curated a brief focused on a familiar challenge for civil engineers working in Sydney. Underground service requirements are spread across numerous authorities and standards, each with different terminology, conditions and approval processes. Finding and interpreting the right information can be time-consuming, particularly when designers need to understand how new infrastructure interfaces with existing services.
The brief asked the students to research service authority requirements and develop a more accessible reference system for Robert Bird Group’s stormwater designers.
The journey to a working prototype
Over six weeks, the five-person team brought together civil, software and mechanical engineering perspectives. Robert Bird’s Allen Ang and Viet Lam worked with the students through regular project sessions, while supporting the team with technical questions and coordination as the work developed.
The students first consolidated requirements from key Sydney utility authorities into a structured and traceable database and reference library. They then developed the concept into a web-based prototype that allows designers to work with service plans, identify interactions and retrieve relevant clearance and excavation information, with each requirement traceable to its original source.
The team incorporated an AI assistant to make the information easier to interrogate and explore. For Robert Bird Group, the way the students approached AI was one of the most impressive aspects of the project. Rather than simply applying the technology, they considered where it could add value, where verification was still required and how it could sit within a wider engineering workflow.
The resulting prototype provides a credible foundation for a tool that could ultimately support faster and more consistent preliminary assessment of underground service constraints.
Robert Bird Group Principal Chris Waite said,
“The exchange worked both ways. The students gained direct exposure to an authentic engineering problem and the judgement required to work through it, while our team had the opportunity to see how the next generation of engineers is approaching digital tools and AI with few preconceptions about how these problems have traditionally been solved.
Their critical thinking, collaborative approach and the speed with which they moved between research, engineering and digital development were particularly impressive.”
Congratulations to the student team, Jacaranda Flame Consulting and the University of Sydney for another rewarding collaboration.
