The UK has fallen significantly behind other countries when it comes to adopting robotics/automation within factories. Collaborative automation, that works directly with people, offers fantastic opportunities for strengthening UK manufacturing and rebuilding the UK economy. It will enable companies to increase productivity, to be more responsive and resilient when facing external pressures (like the Covid-19 pandemic) to protect jobs and to grow. To enable confident investment in automation, we need to overcome current fundamental barriers. Automation needs to be easier to set up and use, more capable to deal with complex tasks, more flexible in what it can do, and developed to safely and intuitively collaborate in a way that is welcomed by existing workers and wider society. To overcome these barriers, the ISCF Research Centre in Smart, Collaborative Robotics (CESCIR) has worked with industry to identify four priority areas for research: Collaboration, Autonomy, Simplicity, Acceptance. The initial programme will tackle current fundamental challenges in each of these areas and develop testbeds for demonstration of results. Over the course of the programme, CESCIR will also conduct responsive research, rapidly testing new ideas to solve real world manufacturing automation challenges. CESCIR will create a network of academia and industry, connecting stakeholders, identifying challenges/opportunities, reviewing progress and sharing results. Open access models and data will enable wider academia to further explore the latest scientific advances. Within the manufacturing industry, large enterprises will benefit as automation can be brought into traditionally manual production processes. Similarly, better accessibility and agility will allow more Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to benefit from automation, improving their competitiveness within the global market.

Society complexity and grand challenges, such as climate change, food security and aging population, grow faster than our capacity to engineer the next generation of manufacturing infrastructure, capable of delivering the products and services to address these challenges. The proposed programme aims to address this disparity by proposing a revolutionary new concept of 'Elastic Manufacturing Systems' which will allow future manufacturing operations to be delivered as a service based on dynamic resource requirements and provision, thus opening manufacturing to entirely different business and cost models. The Elastic Manufacturing Systems concept draws on analogous notions of the elastic/plastic behaviour of materials to allow methods for determining the extent of reversible scaling of manufacturing systems and ways to develop systems with a high degree of elasticity. The approach builds upon methods recently used in elastic computing resource allocation and draws on the principles of collective decision making, cognitive systems intelligence and networks of context-aware equipment and instrumentation. The result will be manufacturing systems able to deliver high quality products with variable volumes and demand profiles in a cost effective and predictable manner. We focus this work on specific highly regulated UK industrial sectors - aerospace, automotive and food - as these industries traditionally are limited in their ability to scale output quickly and cost effectively because of regulatory constraints. The research will follow a systematic approach outlined in to ensure an integrated programme of fundamental and transformative research supported by impact activities. The work will start with formulating application cases and scenarios to inform the core research developments. The generic models and methods developed will be instantiated, tested and verified using laboratory based testbeds and industrial pilots (S5). It is our intention that - within the framework of the work programme - the research is regularly reviewed, prioritised and and flexibly funded across the 4 years, guided by our Industrial Advisory Board.