Deadline: 05-Apr-23
UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £6 million for late-stage robotics and automation innovation projects. This is to develop industrially ready solutions deployable within manufacturing processes in factories.
The aim of this competition is to develop and demonstrate industrially ready robotics and automation solutions deployable within a factory production area.
Your project must:
- Deliver an innovative digital development or significantly novel application of late stage robotics and automation
- Overcome a technical barrier within manufacturing processes in a factory production setting
- Your project must focus on demonstrating the robotic and automation innovations to deliver productivity, sustainability and resilience improvements to the manufacturing process.
Your project must:
- Be robotics or automation focused within a factory production area
- Be focused on value-adding production tasks or directly associated load, unload and move tasks
- Include a physical deployment within a manufacturing facility or very near equivalent, for example, a comparable development facility
- Demonstrate a clear, scalable commercial exploitation route within the project consortium.
Specific Themes
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Your project can focus on one or more of the following:
- Flexible and modular automation: driving repurposing and flexible redeployment to maximise use life
- Systems integration: productising scalable commercial solutions
- Mobile robotics: including modular robots and multi purpose
- Human assisted and cobots: including ethics and human machine interface (HMI)
- No-code and low-code solutions: to improve SME accessibility and lower access cost
- Flexible packaged solutions: reconfigurable modular solutions, tight access retrofit, hygiene friendly
- Gripper and end-effector optimization: especially for challenging production environments, fragile, shape
- Self powered or cableless systems: to reduce installation and safety challenges, maximise flexibility
- Improving robotic accuracy and dexterity: developing low cost metrology to self adjust
- AI in robotic control: developments in machine learning to improve performance.
Funding Information
- Your project’s total costs must be between £200,000 and £4 million.
Eligibility Criteria
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Your project must
- Have total costs between £200,000 and £4 million
- Not exceed the maximum grant limit of 50% of your total costs
- Start by 1 October 2023
- End by 31 December 2024
- Last between 9 months and 15 months
- Involve at least one factory
- Include both manufacturing and digital technology capabilities in your consortium
- Be applicable to at least one manufacturing sector
- Carry out all of its project work in the UK
- Intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
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Lead Organisation
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To lead a project your organisation must:
- Be a UK registered business of any size
- Collaborate with other UK registered organisations
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To lead a project your organisation must:
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Project Team
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To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
- Business of any size
- Academic institution
- Charity
- Not for profit
- Public sector organisation
- Research and technology organisation (RTO).
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To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
For more information, visit Innovate UK.