From Sensing to Collaboration: Engineering, Exploring and Exploiting the Building Blocks of Embodied Intelligence - An EPSRC Programme Grant

我们的机器人太专业化，在感知方面太贫乏，太不合作，太不安全，无法大规模生产。为了提高社会关怀、制造、物流、服务、检测或农业等战略重要领域的生产力，未来几代机器人需要能够以前所未有的敏锐度感知、解释、行动、导航、协调和协作。愿景：该研究计划的总体目标是提供增强人类能力和潜力的自主系统。这些机器人必须能够有效地执行广泛的定制任务，并且操作员干预最少。在一个可持续的国家卓越中心，我们将发展技术和人的基础，以实现强大的体现智能，即科学和技术，使机器人能够在真实的世界中稳健而灵活地行动，互动和协作。策略：我们的重点是工程，探索和利用集成体现智能的构建模块，以提供自主系统，在其生命周期中，获得所需的传感，感知，操纵，导航，协作和解决问题的能力，使他们能够独立操作，同时显着提高人类的生产力。我们将通过利用只有在部署机器人系统时才会出现的跨研究学科的协同作用，显着扩大机器人在战略和商业价值领域的覆盖范围和多功能性。在这样做的过程中，我们受到基础科学问题和现实世界应用的驱动。与我们的合作伙伴一起，我们有一个明确的范围：多功能协作机器人，其社会和经济足迹广阔。我们的工作将通过一个经过仔细考虑和连贯的研究计划来支持一个国家战略目标：从传感到合作。

Our robots are too specialised, too impoverished in their sensing, too uncooperative and too unsafe to be productive at scale. To contribute to productivity in strategically important areas such as social care, manufacturing, logistics, service, inspection or agriculture, future generations of robots need to be able to sense, interpret, act, navigate, coordinate and collaborate with an hitherto unprecedented acuity. VISION: The overarching aim of this research programme is to deliver autonomous systems which amplify human capacity and potential. These robots must be capable of performing a broad array of bespoke tasks effectively, and with a minimum of operator intervention. In a sustainable national centre of excellence we will grow the technology and people substrate for robust embodied intelligence, i.e. the science and technology to enable robots to robustly and flexibly act, interact and collaborate in the real world. STRATEGY: Our focus is on engineering, exploring and exploiting the building blocks of integrated embodied intelligence to deliver autonomous systems which, over the course of their life-time, acquire the sensing, perception, manipulation, navigation, collaboration and problem solving abilities required to allow them to operate unaided while significantly enhancing human productivity. We will significantly expand the reach and versatility of robots in domains of strategic and commercial value by exploiting synergies across research disciplines, which only emerge when deploying robot systems. In doing so we are driven by both fundamental science questions and real-world applications. Together with our partners, we have a clear scope in mind: versatile, collaborative robots whose societal and economic footprint is vast. Our work will underpin a national strategic aim with a carefully considered and coherent programme of research: from sensing to collaboration.