There is great interest in improving the capabilities of autonomous land vehicles, for a diverse range of applications ranging from inspection/repair in nuclear facilities, pipeline inspections, military surveillance, search and rescue, bomb disposal/mine clearance and space exploration rovers to household vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and pool cleaners. One area of particular interest concerns the navigation of the vehicle and in particular measuring a vehicle's movements or localisation. Odometry or 'dead reckoning' is commonly used to calculate a vehicle's position, and requires some measure of the distance travelled. Currently, the most common technique for measuring odometry involves counting wheel revolutions using wheel encoders. This is prone to errors and inaccuracies, for example due to wheel slippages, unequal wheel diameters, misalignment of wheels, surface roughness and rounding errors due to the discrete sampling of wheel increments. The research proposed here is the development of an improved method of navigation feedback using non-contact optical sensing combined with digital image processing techniques.The research proposed here is the development of an improved method of navigation feedback using non-contact optical sensing combined with digital image processing techniques. The program will involve the construction and demonstration of a test system, the optimisation of processing algorithms and an assessment of its capabilities. This will be followed by the further development of the concept to provide other navigational information about the vehicle's rotation and the detection of vehicle slippages.

At the University of Birmingham we have been developing compact homodyne interferometers for our STFC-funded research program in experimental gravitation. This work has resulted in the development of a novel angular interferometer that we are now adapting for the angular readout of our room temperature and cryogenic torsion balances. We have also applied for 2 patents on the optical design of the interferometer and developed a compact interferometer for commercialisation. Support for this work has come from the STFC Follow On Fund and also from University Knowledge Transfer and Development funding. The original STFC grant, prior to the Follow On Fund, was an Innovative Technology grant aimed at developing an interferometer for drag-free satellite control. We would like to continue this research theme by investigating the application of homodyne interferometers in space missions and in the space environment in general. Homodyne interferometers are promising devices for space applications as they can be simple, compact and contain no active modulation systems and associated power supplies. These advantages carry with them the possibility that they can have lower mass and more reliable than the heterodyne systems and these are clearly desirable features for space applications.However, in principle, homodyne interferometers can have as high resolution and as good linearity as heterodyne systems.

Planetary exploration is the key to one of the most exciting scientific endeavours of the 21st century; the search for life outside planet Earth. A primary role for surface rovers in planetary exploration is exobiological prospecting. Autonomous rovers are the key to finding evidence of former or extant prebiotic or biotic species. For this purpose, reliable and effective instruments that can sample and conduct in-situ astrobiology analysis need to be developed. Currently, drilling requires large axial forces and holding toques and high power. This limits conventional driller/corer applications to very stable and large platforms with solid anchoring. Conventional drillers consume a lot of energy, are subject to drill bit jamming, breaking and dulling, are difficult to use for non-vertical operations and the drilling process is hampered by the accumulation of drilling debris. The aim of this study is therefore to model, design, build and test an ultrasonic driller/corer for planetary astrobiological applications The fundamental principle of ultrasonic drilling is to oscillate a cutting tool in the low ultrasonic frequency range, to produce a small axial motion at a relatively high velocity. The impact of the tool against the surface of the rock produces micro-fractures in the crystal and mineral structure causing the surface to be eroded and broken, thus allowing drilling or cutting to be achieved using a modest preload. The proposed research will develop a novel approach to ultrasonic drilling/coring by adapting flextensional ultrasonic transducers as the driving end of the device, allowing the drill to be miniaturised without loss of vibration amplitude, and to remove the need for rotational drilling. The design will rely on the development of validated finite element models of ultrasonic drilling in rock, in order both to compare different drill designs and to predict the vibration and temperature responses of the drill and workpiece. Bringing essential expertise and support to this project, the industrial partner, EADS Astrium, has world-renowned expertise in the highly specialised field of space science, with several space industry firsts to its credit. EADS Astrium owns some of the best-appointed and most advanced design, manufacture and test facilities in the space industry. The challenges in designing a small, low power, low preload ultrasonic driller/corer to cut through rock, equally apply to the design of novel ultrasonic devices for welding processes and food cutting applications. Currently, ultrasonic welders are large assemblies but, with the move towards miniaturisation of electronic and medical devices, the capability of joining dissimilar materials such as metals, ceramics and glass, has become of paramount importance. Ultrasonic cutting of food products has proved to be an effective technology, achieving substantial reductions in product waste and improved cut quality at increased cutting speed. However, ultrasonic cutters tend to be large tools capable of cutting only a limited range of food products. For both applications, successful design of the ultrasonic driller/corer will provide opportunities for the design of a new generation of low power ultrasonic welding devices and cutters, adaptable to a much wider variety of materials. The UK division of Branson Ultrasonics, the second industrial partner, is the market leader in ultrasonic welding and, as a result of close relationships with the food industry, has recently developed several new innovations for ultrasonic cutting of food products. Branson are therefore in a unique position in the UK to collaborate in this research project.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Over the past three decades the US GPS (Global Positioning System) has evolved from a system designed to provide metre-level positioning for military applications to one that is used for a diverse range of unforeseen, and mainly civilian, applications. This evolution has been both driven and underpinned by fundamental research, including that carried out at UK universities, especially in the fields of error modeling, receiver design and sensor integration. However, GPS and its current augmentations still cannot satisfy the ever increasing demands for higher performance. For instance there is insufficient coverage in many urban areas, it is not accurate enough for some engineering applications such as the laying of road pavements and receivers cannot reliably access signals indoors.However things are changing rapidly. Over the next few years the current GNSSs (Global Satellite Navigation Systems) are scheduled to evolve into new and enhanced forms. Modernised GPS and GLONASS (Russia's equivalent to GPS) will bring new signals to complement those that we have been using from GPS for the last 30 years. Also we will see the gradual deployment of new GNSSs including Europe's Galileo and China's Compass systems, so leading to at least a tripling of the number of satellite available today by about 2013 - all with signals significantly different from, and more sophisticated than, those used today.These new signals have the potential to extend the applications of GNSS into those areas that GPS alone cannot satisfy. They will also enable the invention of new positioning concepts that will significantly increase the efficiency of positioning for many of today's applications and stimulate new ones, especially those that will develop in conjunction with the anticipated fourth generation communication networks to provide the location based services that will be essential for economic development across the whole world, including the open oceans. This proposal seeks to undertake a number of specific aspects of the research that is necessary to exploit the new signals and to enable these new applications. They include those related to the design of new GNSS sensors, the modeling of various data error sources to improve positioning accuracy, and the integration of GNSSs with each other and with other positioning-related inputs such as inertial sensors, the eLORAN navigation system, and a wide rage of pseudolite and ultra-wide band radio systems. We are also seeking to find new ways to measure the quality of integrated systems so that we can realistically assess their fitness for specific purposes (especially for safety-critical and legally-critical applications). As part of our work we will build an evaluation platform to test our ideas and validate our discoveries.The proposal builds on the unique legacy of the SPACE (Seamless Positioning in All Conditions and Environments) project, which was a successful EPRSC-funded research collaboration framework that brought together the leading academic GNSS research centres in the UK, with many of the most important industrial organisations and user agencies in the field. The project laid the foundation for an effective, long-term virtual academic team with an efficient interface to access industry's needs and experience. The research proposed here will be carried out within a new collaboration framework (based on SPACE) involving four universities (UCL, Imperial, Nottingham and Westminster) and nine industrial partners (EADS Astrium, Ordnance Survey, Leica Geosystems, Air Semiconductors, ST Microsystems, Thales Research and Technology, QinetiQ, Civil Aviation Authority and NSL). The industrial partners have pledged almost 2M of in-kind support and the proposed management structure, led by one of the industrial partners, is carefully designed to foster collaboration and to bring to bear our combined facilities and resources in the most effective manner.