By Kalwinder Kaur
While addressing at the inauguration of University of the West of England’s Bristol Robotics Laboratory, David Willetts, the Minister for Universities and Science declared funding for around 22 university-based research projects in the UK.
UK Robotics
The investment was directed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and eight- group of partners, and with more than £4 M industrial support. The specialist laboratories, equipment, expertise and suggestions on industrialization and commercialization can be accessed easily. The partners included in this investment are DSTL, BAE Systems, Schlumberger, Network Rail, National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), Sellafield, SCISYS, and the UK Space Agency.
The two fund-awaiting University of Bristol projects include:
Robust Integrated Verification of Autonomous Systems (RIVERAS), by formulating methodologies and techniques, allows designing autonomous intelligent systems with proven reliability.
Building vehicles with legs; the head-mounted cameras observes the human behavior and the resulting visual information enables adaptability to the varying environment and terrain, giving rise to rapid development of vision control for land-based vehicles having legs or wheels.
Unmanned aircraft and other intelligent autonomous systems’ robotics R& D are essential to emerging industries, well-established UK companies, and SMEs, from nuclear energy to railways, from automotive, healthcare to defence, and from advanced manufacturing to oil and gas exploration.
Using sensors, autonomous and intelligent systems can interact with each other and also with humans and are capable of independent action in dynamic, unstable environments.
Source: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/