Authored by: By Ben Pritchard, Chief Technologist, Autonomy Technology Centre, Thales

Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Fellow at the  University of Southampton

 

In March, I completed a week-long tour of American universities, helping the UK’s Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub build and reinforce transatlantic research partnerships and networks.

 

At Thales, I am the Chief Technologist for the Autonomy Technology Centre, based in the UK.  This trip was made possible by my current Industry Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering, which embeds me part-time at the University of Southampton.  As part of this, I am currently closely involved with the TAS Hub, as one of the lead Industry Partners, where I contribute to research projects and support the management of the Hub.

 

I had the pleasure of joining Gopal Ramchurn, Director of the TAS Hub for part of his month-long tour and was able to visit:

• The Intelligent Aerospace Systems Lab at George Washington University
• The Institute of Applied Autonomy at Johns Hopkins University, both the
  • Whiting School for Engineering in Baltimore, Maryland and the
  • Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland
• The University of Texas in Austin, Texas, including:
  • Good Systems and
  • Texas Robotics

 

 

For all our hosts, welcoming us was their first major visit for a couple of years due to the COVID pandemic.  This meant that us being there in person was often the first trigger for the local colleagues to meet each other in person, too, which brought great joy, energy and excitement to the proceedings.

 

• In the tall, glassy buildings of busy Washington, we saw excellent work in Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle perception and management, including the airport-based UAV Traffic Management policies. Their safety verification framework had clear resonance with some UK TAS activities.  Their new doctoral training model for co-design of Trustworthy AI also stood out, to build centre- and student-links in our UK Centres for Doctoral Training.

 

• At Johns Hopkins, the IAA was a fantastic example of a “university-affiliated research centre” (APL) coming together with a university (JHU) to address early-stage research concurrently with the applied engineering challenges of bringing them into service with multiple government and industry stakeholders. The red bricks and grassy quads of the Baltimore campus had a real historical, European feel, contrasting and complementing the industrial, almost military-base vibe of APL in Laurel.  The IAA’s “3 pillars” (Technology, Ecosystem, Ethics & Governance) all have clear resonance with TAS and I’m confident of enduring partnership here.  Indeed, I’ve had one follow-up video meeting with them already and another is scheduled to formalise how we can cooperate with maritime autonomous system experiments.

 

• When in the spacious, white, stone buildings and tree-shaded sidewalks of Austin, we explored both Good Systems, which was an ambitiously cross-discipline attempt to address 6 “Grand Challenges” for AI technologies that benefit society, as well as Texas Robotics, including their RoboCup team and their incredible, repurposed basketball court which is now their robot lab. There were clear opportunities to connect this capability and robotic cyber-physical infrastructure to our own, here in the UK.

 

 

Topping-and-tailing my 5 days of work, were 2 days of fantastic ‘tourist stuff’ for my first ever visit to Washington.  I completed a 35,000-step walking tour of many of the major monuments and central tourist destinations on my first day.  Including experiencing my first basketball match, which was intensely fun.  My second day was more on public transport and in museums, where I was able to enjoy the fantastic #IfThenSheCan exhibit at the Smithsonian, even meeting two of the celebrated women in STEM in person!

 

If you ever get the opportunity to join similar ‘tours’ in future, I strongly recommend it.  It was literally a refreshing experience: reinvigorating my excitement and passion for autonomous systems.  It has given me a renewed commitment to help steward some of these emerging technologies into applications in industry as well as a series of tangible follow-up activities for me, Thales and the whole UK TAS Network.

 

This Fellowship was supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Industrial Fellowships scheme, funded by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

 

 

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