A Harwell-based AI & robotics start-up has received £1m as part of a contract with the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), which will see the company to design, develop and supply a mobile robot concept demonstrator.
The tracked robot, intended to replace people from being the first point of contact in the event of a chemical or biological incident, is being developed for end-customer Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
It is hoped the robot will eventually help DEFRA to deliver environmental remediation and recovery following Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) incidents in the UK.
“It’s a fantastic win for us”, said Mike Lawton, co-founder and director of Oxford Dynamics.
“It’ll allow us to showcase the team’s innovative robotic skills fused with the novel AI that we’re developing” , he said.
According to its developer, the robot will be expected to operate beyond the line of sight of an operator and in difficult and unknown terrains, all while carrying out a range of semi-autonomous activities.
The company is situated at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory on Harwell Campus at Harwell, providing opportunities to test the device representative terrains covering grass, concrete, gravel, steps and slopes.
Longer-term, the company wants to add its edge-compute Large Language Module (LLM) capability to the robot in the form of Oxford Dynamics’ AVIS generative AI software framework, called AVIS.
Its vision is to allow robots to process dynamic real-time data, while also being controlled ‘in a very human-like manner’.
“A great example of future implementation of AI is the ability of an operator to tap on an object of interest on the screen and the robot will automatically work out how best to pick it up and store the object onboard,” Lawton added.
“AI automation requires object detection, surface quality assessment and estimation of weight so that the robot can reliably recover heavy objects without over-balancing itself.”
The machine is due to for initial customer evaluation in September 2024.
