Biological soft solids are remarkable active systems, sustaining complex functions such as motion, digestion, and even consciousness itself. Conversely, engineered soft solids, like rubbers and gels, typically serve lifeless functions such as dampers, cushions, and seals. A grand challenge for engineering and material science is to bridge this gap. How do we bring our engineered soft solids to life? Accordingly, this project develops engineering soft solids that can move and morph. Our working is enabled by a new class of materials called liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs). These are soft rubber-band like solids, but at a molecular level they are built out of tiny rigid rods, and all these rods point in the same direction. If the LCE is heated or illuminated, it contracts along this alignment direction, just like a muscle contracts along its fiber direction. The contraction is dramatically large, reversible, and can be used to exert a substantial pulling force. The core of this project is thus to take this exciting new material, and put it to use in shape-shifting devices. To do so, we have formed a dedicated mechanical engineering group to design, simulate, fabricate and test LCE machines. An area of particular excitement is that LCEs can be fabricated with the molecular alignment following almost any desired spatial pattern, which, on heating produces a corresponding pattern of contraction and hence a complex shape change. For example, we can programme an LCE disk to form into a conical shell or a dome. Such patterned shape changes recall how patterns of muscular contraction produce locomotion, and patterns of growth sculpt developing organs. The resulting programmed LCE samples can also conduct sophisticated mechanical tasks - e.g. the cone can lift - blurring the distinction between a material and a machine. During the initial stage, we have used this approach to study LCE lifters, pumps, irises and grabbers. Our work involved fundamental questions about designing alignment patterns for particular functions, and mechanical analysis of how the resultant machines. This has required the development of new software for predicting how LCEs morph, and new techniques for making samples via 3D printing. A key feature of the renewal is the adoption of a new mechanical programming technique for making patterned LCEs. This technique enables us to create much more complex shape changes, such as a disk forming into a face. We will deploy it to fabricate and test smart LCE layers, that will gain dramatic patterns of topography when they are heated/cooled. This device architecture will enable us to create a range of smart morphing surfaces, including one with switchable braille pixels for a haptic display, one with switchable golf-ball like dimples for switchable aerodynamic lift, and one with switchable roughness for lotus-like water repellence. These new LCEs also have remarkably complicated behavior when they are deformed. The alignment direction can rotate within the LCE, often spontaneously forming a complex microstructural pattern, and leading to an unexpectedly soft mechanical response. Our second focus will be to combine experiment and theory to understand these patterns, and develop software that can predict how such LCEs will deform when they are used in machines. Finally, we will develop a next generation of LCE machines. Currently, our machines lift or grab in response to a global temperature change; in practice, in an oven. However, we will establish strategies for applying the heat or light locally within the LCE structures, allowing different parts to move in different ways. We will also monitor how these machines move in real time, allowing feedback between stimulus and result. Combining better control and feedback will be a step change in sophistication, enabling complex manipulation of objects/fluids and guided locomotion, and bringing us ever closer to soft machines that look alive.

An estimated 5 million tonnes of plastic enters SE Asian waters each year, with much of this ending up in the coastal environment. The Philippines, with a population of 110 million, relies strongly on coastal tourism for its economy, and Philippine marine plastic pollution has been attributed to the reliance on single-use plastic (SUP) for everyday household essentials. Although research to date has focused on identifying the quantity and location of plastics, such as the much publicised but potentially misleading "vast ocean garbage patches" (which are, in reality, more like plastic soups), less research has been conducted on determining transport pathways and budgets of marine plastics. In this project, we will focus on the Cebu Islands (Philippines). The challenge of reducing the impacts of marine plastics in this region is acute, and there is an urgent need for sustainable economic development. The Cebu Islands are home to the biggest marine protected area in the Philippines. Through the development of a Sources-Pathways-Receptor (SPR) modelling framework, in this project we will map the transport of marine plastic litter (MPL) from source to sink. The model will incorporate novel non-conservative terms to simulate transformation of the plastic waste as it travels through the system, incorporating, among other processes, changes due to exposure to UV light and mechanical degradation due to wave action. We will focus on the impacts of the plastic waste to mangroves - an unknown but potentially important filter in the plastic cycle. It is known that mangroves capture macroplastics (plastics larger than 5 mm) in their roots, and through the intense burrowing activities of bioturbators such as crabs can act as excellent filters and sinks for relatively large pieces of plastic. However, we will determine the role of mangroves in the microplastic (plastics less than 5 mm) cycle, since mangroves could, in fact, act to further disperse plastic as even smaller particles over longer timescales. By accurately resolving the content and type of MPL in space and time, the impact to receptors (services, industry and environment) will be accurately assessed: both physically (mortality and impact to ecosystem function) but also economically (to industries such as fisheries, aquaculture and tourism).

The economies of Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines), and hence living standards of people living in this region, are intimately coupled to the ocean which is a valuable source of protein via fisheries and income via tourism. Many of these regions also contain valuable natural resources in the shape of forests and peatland which can be harvested for timber, converted to agricultural systems and which store carbon thus regulating the composition of our atmosphere and reducing the rate of global warming. Working out best how to extract resources from terrestrial systems with minimal impact on the coastal systems that they are linked to via rivers is an enormous challenge; logging and land clearance leads to soils entering rivers and coastal waters, changing their transparency, altering fisheries and ultimately losing carbon to the atmosphere. What is needed to understand the best way to manage these competing pressures on the natural environment is information about how it functions and about how the communities which use these systems will respond to likely changes. Putting together the natural scientists who think about soils, forests and rivers with those social scientists who understand what drives people to make the decisions about how they live their lives that they make is a massive challenge. However unless we do this we will only understand one half of the problem. In this project we will therefore both sample coastal waters and rivers in western Borneo to assess their functioning and health and assess the needs of the local communities via questionnaires and interviews. We will put these two halves of the project together via a series of workshops which we believe will better help Malaysia cope with environmental change and manage their natural resources in a sustainable manner. Key elements of the project involve sampling a range of disturbed and Undisturbed rivers and coastal waters, working out the key processes which lead to the loss of soil into the Marine environment, what happens to it and how it affects the ecosystem and looking at how these processes have changed over time and how people's exploitation of coastal espouses have evolved in parallel.

Autonomous driving (AD) has a huge market and IS receiving enormous attention in both academia and industry. To deal with complex scenarios, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will use reinforcement learning (RL) to design high-level planners in the functional layer but always suffer from safety issues during sim-to-real transfer. One of the main challenges is that the current practice of functional-layer design does not sufficiently consider the uncertainty in the architecture layer, e.g., the software layer and hardware layer. This open challenge will be tackled in this project by a comprehensive study of the interaction between RL and architecture-layer uncertainty. Specifically, we will build virtual AD scenarios on the simulation platform with formal modeling of architecture-layer uncertainty based on real-world data (WP1). The impact of uncertainties on RL will be discussed via the design of cross-layer uncertainty-aware RL (WP2). Inversely, we will also study the robustness of an RL with respect to cross-layer uncertainty by computing the Pareto front of the largest software/hardware uncertainty patterns that a given RL is robust to (WP3). Extensive analysis including verification (WP2, WP3), simulation (WP2, WP3), and real-world experiments (WP4) will be carried out. The success of this project will greatly improve the practicability of RL in AD with a broader impact on other robotics applications.

This project aims to reduce the impact of marine plastic pollution in South East Asia by understanding how microorganisms living on plastic surfaces affect the pollution threat and by exploring the potential of these microorganisms to provide a solution to the problem. SE Asian seas receive outputs from five of the top ten global emitters of plastic debris but there is little understanding of the threat to ecosystems and 650 million humans living in the region posed by 'plastispheres', the term used to describe the combination of plastic and the microorganisms that live on it. We need to characterise the microorganisms living on plastics in the sea and explore how they affect the breakdown of plastic. Through this we will understand how microorganisms transform plastic surfaces and determine the ultimate fate of plastic detritus in the marine environment. We need to measure the impact these plastispheres have on marine environments and wildlife in order to accurately characterise the hazard posed by plastispheres, and not just plastics, to the region's ecosystems. We will search for solutions to removing plastics and grow an informed and connected community of regional stakeholders in order to reduce environmental damage by current and future plastic pollution. This project coordinates the expertise of researchers from Singapore, UK, Indonesia,the Philippines and Vietnam to carry out laboratory and field experiments on microbial colonisation and transformation of plastic. We will analyse the DNA of biofilms and use microscopy to measure plastic degradation to identify the microorganisms living on the plastics and how they affect the plastic breakdown. We will quantify the volume, type and location of plastisphere loads in key habitats and animals to measure the impact plastispheres have on selected coastal ecosystems - mangroves, coral reefs and beaches. We will direct enzymes discovered in biofilms for use in bioengineered recycling, helping the transition towards a circular plastics economy in which waste plastic is intercepted before it enters the sea and is converted into useful products. We will coordinate with regional policy organisations and action groups to grow an informed and connected community of plastic stakeholders. We will conduct workshops to share expertise, disseminate our ideas and engage with stakeholders in order to develop solutions applicable to the SE Asian region. The project will give a novel perspective that shows how the threats from marine plastic are mediated by microorganisms, facilitating innovative solutions and enhancing regional governance of marine plastic pollution.