"Perceiving, Modelling and Interacting Autonomously in a Dynamic Object-Based World" The Dyson Robotics Lab at Imperial College was founded in 2014 as a collaboration between Dyson Technology Ltd and Imperial College. It is the culmination of a thirteen-year partnership between Professor Andrew Davison and Dyson to bring his Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms out of the laboratory and into commercial robots, resulting in Dyson's 360 Eye vision-based vacuum cleaning robot in 2015 which can map its surroundings, localise and plan systematic cleaning pattern. Our success in working together made it clear that computer vision is a key enabling technology for future robots. This proposal aims to fund the Lab to push the forefront of visual scene understanding and vision-enabled robotic manipulation into new and more demanding application areas. The research activity we are outlining in this Prosperity Partnership complements the large internal R&D investment that Dyson is making to to created advanced robotic products. The aims of this partnership are to invent and prototype the breakthrough robot vision algorithms which could truly take us to next generation capability for advanced robotics working in unstructured environments, and to transfer this technology into the long-term product pipeline of Dyson as they aim to open up new product categories. Dyson has now been working on robotics for nearly 20 years, a period during which the emergence of real consumer robotic products has happened alongside astounding progress in academic research in the broad field of AI. At the present time, floor cleaners are still the only category of mass-market robot which have achieved significant commercial success. This can be put down simply to the greater difficulty of the other more complex tasks and chores that a consumer might want an autonomous product to achieve. These tasks place much larger demands on a robotic system to understand and interact with its complicated 3D surroundings and the objects they contain. This programme will focus on creating the research breakthroughs needed to enable this next generation capability. There are scene perception and modelling competences which underly all of these use cases, and these will be our research focus as we develop the algorithms behind next-generation object-based SLAM systems by combining all of our knowledge in state-based estimation and machine learning. We will also work more specifically on the methods for training learning systems; methods for advanced vision-guided manipulation; and the frameworks needed for practical, contextual human-robot interaction. The core scientific work will be forward-looking and academic, but always with a strong guidance from our partners at Dyson.

The development of Li ion batteries (LiBs) has progressed through the evolution of improved electrochemically active electrode materials and has provided steady improvements in performance. Every LiB battery comprises two electrodes (anode and cathode), each made up of three materials: the electrochemically active material, a binder (typically a polymer) and an electrical conductivity enhancer (typically carbon black). The relative fractions of these three materials, blended together with a fugitive liquid into a slurry, plus the final electrode porosity that allows the liquid electrolyte to flood into the electrode, are optimized based on exhaustive electrochemical testing. Commercial tools are available to help guide this optimisation but are useful only for the most conventional types of electrode. As new manufacturing approaches that allow for more controlled arrangements of the materials to form "structured electrodes" are invented and the resulting devices show better performance, there arises an exciting opportunity to identify, from the uncountable number of possible 2D and 3D spatial arrangements of the electrode materials, those which offer significant improvements in device performance in particular applications. However, to achieve this optimisation through current empirical approaches is impossibly slow and expensive. This proposal will develop a suite of modelling tools bridging micro to macro lengths-scales to guide the optimization of the spatial distribution of electrode structure to advance the performance, lifetime and introduction of next generation energy storage devices. This design optimization is especially critical where LiB and other systems are pushed to their limits e.g. high power (rapid charge/discharge) applications for EVs, or where ion mobility is otherwise restricted, such as inherently safe but low ionic mobility solid-state batteries. Insights generated will include the optimal spatial arrangements (in three dimensions) of porosity, particle size, binder, porosity for different materials, device formats and applications, how they could be manufactured, and how their properties vary with time in operation. The novelty of our methodology is: (1) a new approach to describe the dynamics of ion movement in energy storage electrodes efficiently that allows the models to be used in optimisation even when significantly more degrees of freedom are available, and (2) the use of a new manufacturing capability for large scale structured electrodes for model validation. By linking models, design optimisation, manufacture and performance measurements the programme will deliver material-independent and generic tools for optimisation of any Li ion, Na ion, supercapacitor or other electrode-based device, within the context of strong industrial guidance and engagement.

Energy is one of the major issues at the top of the national policy agenda. Energy Efficiency is key to meeting the national targets set by the UK government and by international treaty to reduce CO2 emissions. Electrical Motors and Drives are the driving force in industry and economy. The two areas are amongst the small number of "grow" areas identified by EPSRC's shaping capability agenda. Similarly, Power Electronics is widely recognised as one of the UK's key and high-growth technologies owing to its pivotal role in delivering low-carbon technologies. For the last several decades, the UK has been leading the way internationally in developing high performance power conversion devices but further improvement in performance calls for accurate validation tools. At Newcastle as well as in the UK, we presently rely on input-output methods to test PM machine drives and power electronics, which proved to lack precision for highly efficient ones. This limitation hampers our research activities because many cutting-edge technologies of importance to the UK, leading to impact in the aerospace, automotive and domestic applications, require high-efficiency motors and drives. To date we cannot accurately validate our numerical models in which the prediction and achievement of very low losses can make the difference between success and failure of a concept. Typically, uncertainties tend to be greater than 2% of system efficiency which may be more than the total predicted loss in the system. As a result, there is a pressing need for a highly accurate facility to measure power losses in electric machines and power converters to an accuracy of 1-2W, which does not currently exist anywhere in the world. This proposal addresses national and institutional strategic needs by proposing an innovative calorimeter and by examining machines' and converters' power loss models using it. To deliver this we will bring together our leading experts in calorimetry, PM machines and power electronics. Once completed the project will provide the UK (based in Newcastle) with a high-precision and versatile capability for the experimental evaluation of the power losses and efficiency of PM machines and power converters, and then improvements on these devices will follow accordingly. This proposed work will have a long-lasting impact over the next 10-50 years. It will push the boundary forward in accurate power measurement, enabling future development of key emerging industry involving high-efficiency electrical machines and PE devices that would not otherwise happen. The technologies developed from this work will be potentially applied to many applications and will contribute to the UK's competitiveness in high-performance electrical drives such as aircrafts, electric vehicles, renewables and domestic products.

Energy is one of the major issues at the top of the national policy agenda. Energy Efficiency is key to meeting the national targets set by the UK government and by international treaty to reduce CO2 emissions. Electrical Motors and Drives are the driving force in industry and economy. The two areas are amongst the small number of "grow" areas identified by EPSRC's shaping capability agenda. Similarly, Power Electronics is widely recognised as one of the UK's key and high-growth technologies owing to its pivotal role in delivering low-carbon technologies. For the last several decades, the UK has been leading the way internationally in developing high performance power conversion devices but further improvement in performance calls for accurate validation tools. At Newcastle as well as in the UK, we presently rely on input-output methods to test PM machine drives and power electronics, which proved to lack precision for highly efficient ones. This limitation hampers our research activities because many cutting-edge technologies of importance to the UK, leading to impact in the aerospace, automotive and domestic applications, require high-efficiency motors and drives. To date we cannot accurately validate our numerical models in which the prediction and achievement of very low losses can make the difference between success and failure of a concept. Typically, uncertainties tend to be greater than 2% of system efficiency which may be more than the total predicted loss in the system. As a result, there is a pressing need for a highly accurate facility to measure power losses in electric machines and power converters to an accuracy of 1-2W, which does not currently exist anywhere in the world. This proposal addresses national and institutional strategic needs by proposing an innovative calorimeter and by examining machines' and converters' power loss models using it. To deliver this we will bring together our leading experts in calorimetry, PM machines and power electronics. Once completed the project will provide the UK (based in Newcastle) with a high-precision and versatile capability for the experimental evaluation of the power losses and efficiency of PM machines and power converters, and then improvements on these devices will follow accordingly. This proposed work will have a long-lasting impact over the next 10-50 years. It will push the boundary forward in accurate power measurement, enabling future development of key emerging industry involving high-efficiency electrical machines and PE devices that would not otherwise happen. The technologies developed from this work will be potentially applied to many applications and will contribute to the UK's competitiveness in high-performance electrical drives such as aircrafts, electric vehicles, renewables and domestic products.

There is an increasing demand for storing electrical energy for portable devices with the popularity of mobile phones and emerging trends such as wearable technologies. The move from petrol fuelled cars to electric cars to reduce carbon emissions and hence tackle climate change has also produced an increased need for electrical energy storage so that today more than one billion lithium-ion batteries are sold each year. Lithium-ion batteries are usually used because they can store more electrical energy than competing technologies whilst being physically small and light. Capacitors are an alternative method of storing electrical energy however because they are larger and weigh more than batteries they are only used in applications where a lot of energy is needed in a short time as they can discharge their energy quickly. This project aims to reduce the size and weight of capacitors whilst still allowing them to store sufficient electrical energy so that they can compete with batteries and use their natural advantages of quick charging and discharging along with their improved device lifetimes (their ability to store energy does not reduce over time like a battery does) to create better energy storage devices. Our industrial partners Dyson are interested in this technology for their small portable and autonomous products. The amount of charge that a capacitor can store is dependent on the material that it is made out of. The more the material resists the electrical field applied to it (e.g. higher permittivity) the more energy that can be stored in the device. In this project, we will develop a material that has a fantastically higher permittivity than naturally occurring materials. To achieve this material we will use a novel technique for assembling metal nanoparticles (particles that are 1 billionth of a meter across) into long strands of particles that look like "pearl chains" with insulating gaps between them. Once we have made a capacitor with our new technique we will measure how much energy the capacitor can store and hence how much the material it is made out of can resist the electrical fields applied. We will perform simulations of the devices and compare them to the results measured to help determine which physical description best describe the physics present in the new material. This project will culminate in the production of a technology demonstrator where we will produce a device that uses one of our capacitors to store energy to run an LED. Our proposal fits with the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) objectives 1, 2 and 3. Our project partners, Dyson, are planning to invest £1B in energy storage research and development over the next several years, much of which will be spent investing in other companies working on energy storage however our project will give them an improved capability and increased capacity to invest this money in UK based research (ISCF objective 1).Our project involves interdisciplinary research between Chemists, Engineers and Physicists to produce a new way to manufacture high permittivity materials. The new interdisciplinary research comes from using a chemical approach to build nanometre scale building blocks and then assemble these with electrical engineering techniques into long thin interrupted metallic strands whose size allow them to exhibit quantum mechanical phenomena. This new interdisciplinary method of creating these structures for energy storage fits with the ISCF objective 2. Energy storage in supercapacitors in an established field of research with a great deal of activity aimed at increasing the energy that can be stored at the solid/liquid interface. Our technique is innovative in that it uses a fundamentally different approach where the charge is stored in nanodielectrics instead. This project will then allow our project partners to be involved in research which is more innovative and higher risk than they otherwise would be able to undertake (ISCF objective 3).