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£1m funding competition for robotics

The Government have announced a £1m funding competition to drive robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) technology in the UK.

Universities and Science Minister David Willetts was speaking at think tank Policy Exchange and said the technology could make a difference to high value manufacturing and agriculture sectors.

The funding will go towards feasibility studies for RAS concepts where robots can interact with each other and humans.

Iain Gray, Chief Executive of the Technology Strategy Board said:“The UK has world-class strengths in the underlying science and engineering contributing to these systems and access to the markets that could exploit them so what is needed now is collaboration across multiple sectors of innovators. This will encourage new partnerships so that we find novel solutions to known problems.”

It is hoped the competition will also assist UK innovators and researchers in attracting future investment for further R&D and commercialisation from new funding mechanisms such as Horizon 2020.

All projects must be collaborative and led by an SME. They will last up to 12 months and each grant is envisaged to be up to £133,000.

The competition opens on February 2. For further information please visit www.innovateuk.org where details will be posted shortly.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .