Across Chemring, it’s our mission to find new and smarter ways to do things. One of our core values is Innovation - creating world-class solutions and developing world-class thinking. Our engineers, scientists, and consultants are world experts in conceptualising and developing key innovations that are revolutionising industries.
But what does innovation look like in reality? And how do we make sure that innovation is focused on finding solutions rather than becoming too conceptual? We caught up with Roke Innovation Leader Ash, to find out how the innovation team at Roke is exploring the future of autonomy and how to scale the use of robots.
Bringing the physical and the digital together is Roke’s mission, and innovation is the cornerstone of the organisation. Roke reinvests 7% of its revenue directly back into innovation. And what’s key is that our customer’s problems sit at the heart of our research and development.
“We have different capabilities and specialities within our Innovation team, and we combine that with the Roke Academy, bringing in individuals to work on specific research projects. We focus on practical applications that are commercially driven with the customer at the heart. This isn’t about ‘pie in the sky’ innovation. We’re looking at the future needs of our customers and how we can start to solve those today.”
One such area that Ash and the team are currently researching is how to operate robots at scale. “One of the things we’re interested in at Roke is operating robots at a massive scale. There are lots of organisations working with one or two robots, but real operational environments in the future are going to need hundreds of robots working collaboratively together to solve complex problems. "What we’re looking at is how to use a combination of different robots, which we call a squad, to solve a greater problem. Our research is looking at how we bring together all these different capabilities, both on the physical and the digital side.”
In their research, the Roke team considers not just scale in terms of numbers, but increasing levels of autonomy, cooperation, and system complexity. So, if we were deploying such robots at scale today, what might that look like? “The issue we face today is that each robot type is treated as an individual asset. So, while a group of drones for example may work together to create a display, you would struggle to then get those drones to work with a different group of robots who have a different task to complete. Being able to manage the state of readiness of each of the robots would also be a challenge.
“One of the main things holding back the scaling of robotics is that we generally look to create more complex or capable robots. And that’s very expensive. However, the core idea for squads of robots is that we can trade the sophistication of individual robots for large groups of cheaper, commoditised units. This reduces the cost of manufacture and repair and enables simple reconfiguration for different roles. With commoditised robots at scale, we can keep a variety of units ready to go and intelligently deploy the ones best suited to the task at hand.”
The next big question is the notion of autonomy. What or who has the final say? Adds Ash, “It’s a question of ‘human in the loop’ versus ‘human on the loop’. We want robots to do things on their own and interact with humans. But it’s the human that still makes the key decisions. This is about distilling control to lots of robots in a squad using a plan set by a human controller. We can then take some of the simple tasks away from the humans, such as making sure the robots are fully charged, as they could charge themselves. So, there is an element of self-management performed by individual robots which enables scale by reducing management required by a human operator.” This is a huge avenue of growth and we’re doing things that no-one’s done before with this research. The advancement of robotics demands collective effort, and at Roke, we’re actively inviting other researchers and policymakers to join us in this next stage of robotic operations and development. I’m excited to be part of building the future for robotics.”