Our project aims to revolutionise the inspection of offshore renewable energy infrastructure. We are conducting a feasibility study to explore the use of autonomous vessels and nested robotic systems for comprehensive inspections. These robots will include flying drones and unmanned underwater vehicles, all deployed from a single unmanned, hydrogen-powered vessel. Imagine a ship that sails to an offshore wind farm, where instead of human divers and instead of dangling hundreds of metres high to inspect turbine blades, a team of robots is instead deployed to perform the inspections. These robots can fly around the wind turbines and dive underwater to check for any issues, providing a thorough inspection that is faster, safer, and more efficient than traditional methods. Offshore wind farms play a crucial role within a rapidly growing global renewable energy market. However, maintaining these structures is challenging due to their location and the harsh marine environment. Traditional inspection methods are costly, time-consuming, and often limited by weather conditions. Our solution addresses these challenges head-on by using advanced robotics to perform inspections without the need for human intervention, thus reducing costs and improving efficiency. One of the standout features of our project is the use of a hydrogen-powered vessel created by ACUA Ocean. This vessel acts as a base for the robots while significantly reducing the environmental impact compared to traditional diesel or MGO powered ships. This improves inspection methods and contributes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The economic benefits of our approach are substantial. Traditional inspections take days and involve significant downtime for the renewable energy infrastructure, affecting energy production and incurring high operational costs. Our robotic systems could perform these inspections much faster, reducing downtime and ensuring that the energy production continues uninterrupted. This translates into direct cost savings and higher operational uptime for energy providers. Moreover, our project supports job creation and technological advancement in the UK. By developing and deploying these advanced technologies locally, we are fostering growth in the robotics, renewable energy, and maritime sectors. This positions the UK as a leader in innovative renewable energy solutions, attracting further investment and collaboration opportunities. Through this feasibility study, we will demonstrate the technical and economic viability of our approach, paving the way for real-world implementation by 2027\. Our vision is to create a sustainable, efficient, and technologically advanced method for maintaining offshore renewable energy infrastructure, ensuring its longevity and reliability for years to come.

Bettering Our Worlds (BOW) Ltd. is working on developing software that will provide explainable, trustworthy and easy to use AI for commercial and domestic applications of robotic technologies. The goal of this feasibility study is to establish test-beds for this new technology in three different domains: domiciliary healthcare, dynamic manufacturing and hazardous environment operations. Within this project we will develop a hybrid machine learning approach that is capable of learning directly from skilled workers and provide explainability of decisions and actions. The system will not only feature training by skilled human operators but also integrates human-operated teleoperation as a failsafe for tasks that are too difficult or unpredictable for the AI. BOW believes that this approach will increase trust in automation, and overcome barriers to entry such as cost and deployment time. This project and its trust-centric approach is aligned with the long term vision and technological roadmap for BOW Ltd that has so far delivered a software development kit that enables anyone to code once and deploy to any robot. With the help of iUK we are bringing our expertise in democratising complex technologies and applying it to AI and ML to empower anyone to use these powerful technologies.

This project will generate a beyond-state-of-the-art robot telepresence system that will enable people to visit remote locations and interact with others by operating a robot body using virtual reality and wearable computing interfaces. Users will see through the robot's eyes, hear what the robot hears, and will be able to control the robot's movements in its environment, including the movement of arms and hands. This technology will make use of cloud computing and low-latency 5G communications to provide a compelling, immersive and user-friendly experience that will be as close to 'being there' as is possible without actual travel. We are targeting market opportunities in property management, exhibitions and conferences, and telecare, all three of which are sectors that have been substantially affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and its ensuing impacts on travel and personal contact. These industries are also facing increasing challenges in order to become more environmentally sustainable. Immersive telepresence can provide alternative ways to view and manage properties, meet people and attend public events, and provide forms of healthcare that are safe, low-carbon, and sustainable. We are committed to inclusive technology development and will consult with users with physical and sensory impairments in to order to create accessible and affordable solutions to immersive telepresence that operate across a range of commercially available robots.