Tagged / Robotics

Apply for Innovate UK Robotics and AI for safer work residential and funding

Collaborative Decision Making

Innovate UK is offering opportunities for individuals to apply on behalf of their business to attend a 5-day residential innovation lab in September 2018. This innovation lab will allow delegates to work in teams to generate innovative and commercially-viable ideas in the following areas:

  • robotic structural capabilities
  • reformable structures
  • long-range and beyond visual line-of-sight operations
  • electronics, sensors and photonics for extreme environments
  • AI, autonomy and situational awareness
  • mission planning and risk management
  • systems engineering, including methodologies, verification and validation tools
  • security, reliability, safety and trust
  • collaborative robotics and AI systems
  • long endurance operations
  • modules that support increased dexterity
  • locomotion platforms that work extreme environments

In the second stage of the competition, teams that attended the innovation lab will have the opportunity to apply for a share of up to £15 million grant funding for their project.

Please see below a summary of the competition:

Deadline for application: 11 July 2018

Number of places available : 20 to 30

Eligibility: a business, academic, charity, public sector or research and technology organisation based in the UK and intend to carry out the project and exploit the results in the UK

Residential dates : 10 September 2014 – 14 September 2018

Second stage proposal award : £2m – £6m

Second stage proposal start date : January 2019

Please see this link for full details of this funding opportunity.

Political and Policy – News & Publications

Health

Macmillian has published the specialist cancer adult nursing and support workforce census 2017.

The Education Policy Institute has published research on vulnerable children and social care in England.

On Tuesday there is a Westminster Hall debate on safeguarding children and young people in sport, and a Health and Social Care Select Committee examining childhood obesity.

Meindert Boysen has been appointed as Director of the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation.

On Friday Jeremy Hunt launched a review into the impact of technological advances on the NHS workforce.

On Wednesday there will be an adjournment debate on Mental Health Services

Other topics

Clive Efford has joined the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee as a member. On Wednesday this committee will meet to consider Fake News.

David Clark, Kenny Dey and Nick Terrell have been appointed as members of the Oil & Gas UK Trade Association.

On Tuesday the Education Select Committee will examine Alternative Provision.

On Tuesday the Home Affairs Committee will meet to discuss Policing for the future.

On Wednesday there will be a Westminster Hall debate on reducing plastic waste in the maritime environment.

APPGs

There is a new register of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG). Check the list to see which fit with your research interests (scroll down past the country groups to the subject groups).

This week the following APPGs will meet: Social Work (on Tuesday), Industrial Heritage (Tuesday), Archaeology (Tuesday), Carers (Wednesday).

 

Catch up on last week’s policy news here, or email policy@bournemouth.ac.uk to subscribe.

 

Innovate UK – emerging & enabling technologies – funding opportuntites

space SBRI

The Emerging and Enabling Technologies sector group is the new home for  support for early stage (emerging), cross-cutting (enabling) and broad scope (open) innovation across whole economy. (See the Delivery Plan 2016 to 2017 for more information on all the sector groups .)

Although this sector group contains the word technologies in its title, Innovate UK’s actions are guided by the principle that: “no-one buys technology; they buy what technology does for them.”    

The focus here is very early stage technologies, those still emerging, or only recently emerged, from the research base.

By ‘emerging’,  recognise  those technologies, methods and approaches developed in the UK’s scientific research base – primarily in universities – that allow us  to do things that simply couldn’t be done before (or could only be done in theory).

What these emerging technologies have in common is the potential to create totally new value propositions (and so to disrupt markets). Examples include graphene and quantum technologies.

Whilst sectors like Manufacturing and Materials or Health and Life Sciences turnover several hundreds of billions of pounds globally per year, by contrast, many of these early-stage, emerging technology sectors have very low, or even zero turnovers, typically below £10 million pa when we pick them up.

Examples of other high impact technologies include:

  • space and satellites
  • electronics, photonics and sensors
  • robotics and autonomous systems

It has now been admirably demonstrated that:

  • satellite technologies can be used in the fight against illegal fishing
  • advanced sensors can help in the earlier diagnosis of disease
  • compound semi-conductors can manage electrical power more effectively
  • robots can perform tasks in environments too dangerous for people to work in

You can follow Innovate UK on:

     

Robotics and autonomous systems: apply for innovation funding

robot_in_tomorrows_world

Competiton is open now!

There will be a briefing webinar on 27 July 2016

Find out more about this competition and apply

In brief:

Innovate UK is inviting businesses to apply for a share of £5 million to develop innovative applications of robotics and autonomous systems. Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) are to invest up to £5 million in robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) projects.

The aim of this competition is to help UK companies explore new RAS opportunities. It will enable them to develop capabilities for applications in many sectors of the UK economy.

We are looking for proposals that will speed up the development of RAS technologies towards demonstration and commercialisation.

Proposals can be for systems that are physical, for example a next generation robot. They can also be digital only, for example an automated decision-making system.

Robots that are independent of human control can learn, adapt and take decisions. These could revolutionise our economy and society over the next 20 years. Disruptive technologies related to RAS include mobile internet, automation of knowledge work, advanced robotics, and automated and autonomous vehicles.

These technologies have the potential for an annual economic impact of US$9.8 to US$19.3 trillion in 2025. The UK has world-leading strengths in the underlying science and engineering that contributes to RAS. It also has access to the markets that could exploit them.

Key information:

  • There will be a briefing webinar on 27 July 2016
  • The registration deadline is noon on 19 October 2016
  • The application deadline is noon on 26 October 2016
  • Projects should range in size from total costs of £50,000 to £500,000
  • Projects should last between 6 and 15 months
  • You must complete the work and incur, pay and claim for all costs before the end of March 2018
  • A business must lead the project
  • Projects with costs of £100,000 or above must be collaborative

Find out more about this competition and apply.

If you are interested in submitting to this  call you must contact your  RKEO Funding Development Officer with adequate notice before the deadline.

For more funding opportunities that are most relevant to you, you can set up your own personalised alerts on Research Professional. If you need help setting these up, just ask your School’s/Faculty’s Funding Development Officer in  RKEO or view the recent blog post here.

If thinking of applying, why not add notification of your interest on Research Professional’s record of the bid so that BU colleagues can see your intention to bid and contact you to collaborate.

£5 million boost for next generation robotics technologies

robot_in_tomorrows_world

Science Minister Jo Johnson has announced a £5 million challenge, to encourage UK companies and academics to develop robotic innovations.

The challenge will encourage UK businesses and academic institutions to work together to develop new and novel uses for robotics and autonomous systems across different industry sectors. The competition has been devised by the UK’s innovation agency, Innovate UK and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Read the news from Innovate UK here.

This competition is not yet live but is due to be launched  around the week commencing 18th July and more details on it will be available then.

Why not bookmark the Live Competition list by clicking on the link below:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/innovation-grants-for-business-apply-for-funding

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robotics & Autonomous Systems – US leads robotics investment boom

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Rapidly increasing activity in the robotics sphere has led the Financial Times to herald an investment boom time for one of the hottest new markets in tech. And, as robots break free of factory production lines, the US and China are poised to take the lead from Japan and Germany.
After growing at a compound rate of 17 per cent a year, the robot market will be worth $135bn by 2019, according to IDC, a tech research firm. The Asian markets, Japan and China, which is in the early stages of retooling its manufacturing sector, account for 69 per cent of all robot spending. But it’s US investment, which has more than doubled to $587m in 2015, according to CB Insights, that is the major factor in global growth.
Although the amount of cash flowing into the sector is still at a relatively early stage, all the lead indicators of the innovation economy are positive, says the FT: patent filings covering robotics technology have soared, with China alone accounted for 35 per cent in 2015, and venture capital investments more than doubled last year.
“From private equity investors looking to build portfolios of robot investments, to new “incubators” such as Playground, started by former Google robotics chief Andy Rubin, the investment options have been proliferating rapidly.”
“The most interesting things are in Silicon Valley or the US,” Dmitry Grishin, a Russian internet entrepreneur and investor told the FT.
Surging investment in artificial intelligence is giving the US an early advantage in the race to dominate a new era of robotics, say investors and experts. Recent advances, particularly in deep learning, have shifted robotics from its core industrial market into areas such as self-driving cars.
However, as low-cost robots move into more consumer and business uses, such as drones, China’s hardware manufacturing expertise will also make it a more significant player, they believe.
AI, big data and the cloud
The threat from new AI and cloud technologies has also incentivised established players such as Japan’s Fanuc, the world’s largest maker of industrial robots, to up their game. The company plans to start connecting 400,000 installed machines by the end of this year, to collect data about their operations and improve performance and is banking on their proliferation as a means of competing with the likes of Google, in the data sphere at least. Similalry, Germany’s Kuka is building a deep-learning AI network for industrial robots.
While US companies such as Google and Facebook have led  investment in deep learning, Silicon Valley has also seen a wider start-up boom in AI and robotics. A collapse in the price of components, thanks to smartphone growth, has made it cheaper to launch robot companies. But the new entrepreneurs rushing into the field are different from the hardware engineers who historically dominated the field, experts say, and are just as likely not to even use the word “robotics,” with a focus, instead on autonomy and AI.
Complementing this activity, astonishing advances in academia are giving fuel to future visions of what may become possible, with scientists creating living ‘insect-computer hybrid’ robots with user-adjustable speed and gait and exciting innovation in powering the technology, such as ‘ATTO cells’ that will be instrumental in creating intelligent swarms of robots. This nascent technology is expected to enable automation at ten times the speed of the upcoming 5G technology, supporting the deployment of highly-demanding wireless services in domains such as reconfigurable robot factories, intelligent hospitals and flexible offices. Ultimately, individual robots will be able to tap into the computing power of other robots in the swarm and/or local computing power in their immediate environment.
Simplistic machines
But that’s the future and there are plenty of technological and ethical hurdles for robotics to address first. Current goals are infintely more modest: to build single-purpose robots that do one thing very well. If successful, these machines will quickly become part of the fabric of everyday life, much like today’s automated vacuum cleaners or cash machines, say experts.
Another key design feature of many of the early robots is that they will need to operate alongside people, initially at least, making humans more productive rather than replacing them altogether. The limitations of current automation technologies mean that robot companies are thus currently focused on keeping “the human in the loop,” with most experts believing that people will have an important role to play in directing and providing a vital source of learning for the machines for decades to come.
Rapid learning is, in fact, vital for robotics manufacturers’ initial products, according to Grishin. The trick, he says, will be to find a task that relatively simplistic machines are able to handle, then use knowledge gained in the field to rapidly add to their capabilities and usefulness. “First put them in consumers’ hands, then learn from their behaviour.” Thus the machine becomes a minimal vessel for more and more sophisticated software.
It’s a proposition that investors are finding increasingly difficult to resist.

Key insights for the 2035 robot revolution: New report

A “robot revolution” will transform the global economy over the next 20 years, cutting the costs of doing business but exacerbating social inequality, as machines take over everything, according to a new study by investment bank Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
“We are facing a paradigm shift which will change the way we live and work,” the authors say. “The pace of disruptive technological innovation has gone from linear to parabolic in recent years. Penetration of robots and artificial intelligence has hit every industry sector, and has become an integral part of our daily lives.”
The report outlines the opportunities for investors in robotics and artificial intelligence and cites recent research including Oxford University research that finds the coming revolution could leave up to 35% of all workers in the UK, and 47% of those in the US, at risk of being displaced by technology.

Software Verification & Validation for Complex Systems competition

Software verification

Software Verification & Validation for Complex Systems competition has just launched with £580,000 funding available.

Innovate UK and Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) are to invest up to £580,000 in technical feasibility studies to stimulate innovation throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) while focusing on the verification and validation* (V&V) of two classes of complex systems: cyber physical systems (CPS) and systems with emergent behaviours.

This competition encourages businesses to develop appropriate ‘links’ between the behaviour of a system in the physical world and the software implementing its planned interactions. It also seeks to stimulate development of new engineering methods for systems in which a machine – rather than a human user or operator – drives the decision- making process. Such systems can be trained to recognise complex patterns and to make intelligent decisions based on existing data. They are starting to be used in sectors such as automated and autonomous vehicles, and robotics and autonomous systems (RAS). Our aim is to ensure that small and micro businesses in the UK further develop their early capabilities in this area.

Projects are open to companies of any size, but must be led by a small or micro company, working in collaboration with one or more business or research partners.

View all details.