Dear reader,

Covid-19 has and will continue to have unforeseeable consequences for RACE. Of course, it’s odd not seeing people on a daily basis and I know I’m not alone in missing the human-buzz. That said many are reporting an improvement in personal productivity and the remote working is certainly forcing an increased amount of pre-planning for on-site work. RACE is of course a robotics lab so interacting with hardware is part of the job. We now have about 20 individual projects happening on site and more in the pipeline.

The arrival of Spot has caused quite a stir, and whilst trying to avoid the general hype, it is undeniably an impressive machine. A few weeks back Guy Burroughes sorted out controlling Spot from his home, so we are well on the way to showing the potential for Spot as a Ministerial guide dog for remote visits, as well as mobile sensor transport for hazardous spaces. We expect to be able to offer Spot on loan as part of NNUF in due course. Contact Oliver Huke for more information.

Another big milestone was reached with the first external demonstrations of CorteX being used to control TARM. As ever for the nuclear sector the amount of paperwork was considerable, but this does mean the level of scrutiny was high and confidence in the software commensurately so.

Robotics and AI continue to hit the news and will no doubt feature high up in the UK’s R&D spending plans, especially in relation to supporting remote working. But the recent exam shenanigans mean that algorithms have been graded ‘must improve’ by the general public. We’ve been talking about trust in relation to autonomy for some time: how we deal with the sparse or biased data, verify outcomes and deal with outliers will be critical especially in high consequence situations and environments.

Rob Buckingham