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Robotic behaviour

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When I first visited our robotics group, just after I arrived in Salford, I was captivated by two teams of knee-high football players.

When I first visited our robotics group, just after I arrived in Salford, I was captivated by two teams of knee-high football players.

When I first visited our robotics group, just after I arrived in Salford, I was captivated by two teams of knee-high football players.  Each of these mechanical enthusiasts, I was told, would learn from its mistakes and the behaviour of others on the field, and would eventually learn how to play a perfect game. The corner of the lab was given over to enthusiastic research students, shouting on their robotic protégés.  I now think this was a clever move by our colleagues in Computing, Science and Engineering; humanoid robots appeal to subliminal memories of fantastic projections and cultural icons such as Daleks (or are they a life form?). I’ve since learned that our kind of robotics tends to more embedded, intelligent systems.  Innovation is more prosaic, but essential; food processing systems, tackling extreme hazards, advanced manufacturing.

We have a long-established, excellent research group working in this area.  It’s one of those fields that benefits particularly from building up networks that bring together university and industry partners as a sort of supra-embedded and hyper-intelligent system.  Continuing these traditions of success, it’s just been announced that, with our partner institutions, we’ve won €4m funding from the European Union for a Marie Curie Initial Training network that will enable the training of fifteen new doctoral researchers across the countries participating in the group.

Marie Curie Initial Training Networks are highly prestigious awards, They are focused on the training of the next generation of European leading experts in Engineering and Science to increase the European competitiveness in research and development and to solve research challenges of global concern.

The focus of this new work will be on what are termed “dexterous, soft and compliant” systems, “reconfigurable and logistics” robotics and safety in human and robot interactions.  Lest the concept of dexterous and compliant robots suggests something improper, it’s important to add that these applications will all be in the area of sustainable, advanced manufacturing – serous industrial priorities.  The project as a whole comes together under the auspicious acronym SMART-E:  Sustainable Manufacturing through Advanced Robotics Training in Europe.

Professor Samia Nefti-Meziani, who coordinated this successful funding bid, describes the focus of SMART-E as key technical challenges in high-value manufacturing, particularly in mechanism design, actuation, control, sensing, cognitive computation and cognitive interfaces for the aerospace and food sectors.  In writing this, an irreverent thought slips in: flying and food are good emblems for contemporary life, and airline food could stand for some of the low points of daily life.  Such trivia, of course, did not feature in the research consortia’s successful FP-7 bid.

SMART-E as key technical challenges in high-value manufacturing, particularly in mechanism design, actuation, control, sensing, cognitive computation and cognitive interfaces for the aerospace and food sectors

SMART-E’s focus will be on the key technical challenges in high-value manufacturing, for the aerospace and food sectors.

Projects such as these show just how important networks are becoming for this sort of advanced, high-impact research. The SMART-E consortium spans the UK, Germany, Italy and Switzerland  There are six universities in the partnership (Salford, Sheffield, Technical University of Munich, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italian Institute of Technology and the University of Zurich).  And there are leading corporate participants: FESTO, AIRBUS and Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre.  The team is supported by a number of additional leading Universities, research laboratories and industries as associated partners.

This example well makes the point that, in our present and future research, networks are in themselves significant assets without which it will be increasingly difficult to derive value in complex areas of enquiry and application.

We are in the process of revising our approach to research, building on the successful completion of our new Strategic Plan.  SMART-E – and the intelligence embedded in it as an approach to making and applying new knowledge, is a model example of best practice for the present, and the future.

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(The Marie Curie Initial Training Network SMART -E (Sustainable Manufacturing through Advanced Robotics Training in Europe) is a new european research and training programme on Advanced Robotics under the European Union programme FP7-PEOPLE-2013-ITN with a total budget of approximately 4 M Euro (M 3.9 Euro).


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