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了，感知能力太差，太不合作，太不安全，无法规模化生产。为了在社会护理、制造、物流、服务、检验或农业等具有战略重要性的领域提高生产率，未来一代的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：这项研究计划的首要目标是提供能够放大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，并最大限度地减少操作员的干预。在一个可持续的国家卓越中心，我们将培养强大的体现智能的技术和人员基础，即使机器人能够在现实世界中稳健而灵活地行动、互动和协作的科学和技术。战略：我们的重点是工程，探索和利用集成的具体化智能的构建块来交付自主系统，在它们的生命周期中，获得所需的感知、感知、操纵、导航、协作和解决问题的能力，使它们能够在没有辅助的情况下操作，同时显著提高人类的生产力。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效应，显著扩大机器人在具有战略和商业价值的领域的覆盖面和多功能性。在这样做的时候，我们既受到基础科学问题的驱动，也受到现实世界应用的推动。与我们的合作伙伴一起，我们心中有一个明确的范围：多功能、协作型机器人，其社会和经济足迹巨大。我们的工作将通过仔细考虑和连贯的研究方案来支持国家战略目标：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.