The Foot-LITE project will deliver innovative driver/vehicle interface systems and services to encourage sustained changes to driving styles and behaviours which are safer, reduce congestion, enhance sustainability, help reduce traffic pollution emissions, and reduce other social and environmental impacts. Fundamental research will be used to support the strong industry base in the project through prototype systems development and design, impact assessments and the further development of research tools and processes, including the SRIF/TRW funded instrumented vehicle to deliver a credible evidence-based validation of the system through to real-world operational experiences with user feedback and evaluation. The Foot-LITE system is seen as a tool to encourage and challenge drivers to achieve very real benefits that are already available in the current vehicle fleet but whose benefits cannot be readily maximised without an advisory interface to the driver. The approach has the ultimate choice and control still resting with the individual. This is seen to be crucial to the public and commercial acceptability of Foot-LITE. The aim of the Foot-LITE project is to create a revolutionary driver information system designed to educate and encourage safer and greener driving and longer term behavioural changes. The project consists of four Foot-LITE Work Areas. Effective Project Management is crucial to the delivery and testing of technologies and the assessment of their impacts. This Work Area will be the responsibility of the Lead Partner MIRA who encompasses both commercial as well as research expertise. The second Work Area is Market Reviews and Delivery which is focussed on the development of the concept and identification of product opportunities and system enhancements. The third work area, Technical Implementation, will create innovative applications which influence driver behaviour; this will be led by TRW. The fourth Work Area, which is led by TRG (the Academic Lead Partner), uses a variety of approaches, including simulation and large scale fleet trials, to produce an Impact Assessment of the systems and services and to identify those characteristics which will support applications in a future policy and market environment and deliver a tool that has the potential in instigating a step change in driver behaviour to tackle the twin problems of safety and the environment. The project will undertake all the necessary research and development to produce a prototype system which will be evaluated by fleets of drivers in normal driving conditions. The necessary data collection/data base systems for the vehicle fleet will also be developed so that robust evidence of the effectiveness (or otherwise) of the system will be collected, analysed and published to better the overall knowledge in this area. Additional surveys of other user groups to determine long term effects will be undertaken to better determine market opportunities and implementation strategies to deliver future intelligent vehicles and associated infrastructure. The system to be developed in the project comprises an aftermarket, standalone vehicle interface (although installation during vehicle build will not be excluded) giving moment-to-moment feedback during a drive (similar to SatNav), plus a back office support tool for off-line analysis of journeys and retrospective feedback.

The Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre (IMCRC) will undertake a wide variety of work in the Manufacturing, Construction and product design areas. The work will be contained within 5 programmes:1. Transforming Organisations / Providing individuals, organisations, sectors and regions with the dynamic and innovative capability to thrive in a complex and uncertain future2. High Value Assets / Delivering tools, techniques and designs to maximise the through-life value of high capital cost, long life physical assets3. Healthy & Secure Future / Meeting the growing need for products & environments that promote health, safety and security4. Next Generation Technologies / The future materials, processes, production and information systems to deliver products to the customer5. Customised Products / The design and optimisation techniques to deliver customer specific products.Academics within the Loughborough IMCRC have an internationally leading track record in these areas and a history of strong collaborations to gear IMCRC capabilities with the complementary strengths of external groups.Innovative activities are increasingly distributed across the value chain. The impressive scope of the IMCRC helps us mirror this industrial reality, and enhances knowledge transfer. This advantage of the size and diversity of activities within the IMCRC compared with other smaller UK centres gives the Loughborough IMCRC a leading role in this technology and value chain integration area. Loughborough IMCRC as by far the biggest IMRC (in terms of number of academics, researchers and in funding) can take a more holistic approach and has the skills to generate, identify and integrate expertise from elsewhere as required. Therefore, a large proportion of the Centre funding (approximately 50%) will be allocated to Integration projects or Grand Challenges that cover a spectrum of expertise.The Centre covers a wide range of activities from Concept to Creation.The activities of the Centre will take place in collaboration with the world's best researchers in the UK and abroad. The academics within the Centre will be organised into 3 Research Units so that they can be co-ordinated effectively and can cooperate on Programmes.

With the increasing move to more electric systems in aircraft, ships and automobiles, there is a need to ensure that electromechanical actuators are designed to satisfy the conflicting specifications of low cost, low volume/weight, high performance and requiring little maintenance. The conclusion of the more for less design philosophy is that power electronic motor drives will be work harder, in harsher environments, for longer periods of time. Scheduled maintenance periods will be longer, and therefore it is imperative that drives, especially those used for safety critical applications will employ prognosis and diagnosis algorithms as part of their basic control structure, to predict and prevent in-service failure. The work proposed here will investigate the production of new signatures for indicating the condition of a motor drive and its load, and also determine how these signatures can be used to determine the type and severity of a fault. The aim is to embed the condition monitoring into the normal operation of an electromechanical actuator, in order to detect and distinguish between faults in the electrical machine, the power converter and the mechanical system.

Autonomous robots, capable of independent and intelligent navigation through unknown environments, have the potential to significantly increase human safety and security. They could replace people in potentially hazardous tasks, for instance search and rescue operations in disaster zones, or surveys of nuclear/chemical installations. Vision is one of the primary senses that can enable this capability, however, visual information processing is notoriously difficult, especially at speeds required for fast moving robots, and in particular where low weight, power dissipation and cost of the system are of concern. Conventional hardware and algorithms are not up to the task. The proposal here is to tightly integrate novel sensing and processing hardware, together with vision, navigation and control algorithms, to enable the next generation of autonomous robots. At the heart of the system will be a device known as a 'vision chip'. This bespoke integrated circuit differs from a conventional image sensor, including a processor with each pixel. This will offer unprecedented performance. The massively parallel processor array will be programmed to pre-process images, passing higher-level feature information upstream to vision tracking algorithms and the control system. Feature extraction at pixel level results in an extremely efficient and high speed throughput of information. Another feature of the new vision chip will be the measurement of 'time of flight' data in each pixel. This will allow the distance to a feature to be extracted and combined with the image plane data for vision tracking, simplifying and speeding up the real-time state estimation and mapping capabilities. Vision algorithms will be developed to make the most optimal use of this novel hardware technology. This project will not only develop a unique vision processing system, but will also tightly integrate the control system design. Vision and control systems have been traditionally developed independently, with the downstream flow of information from sensor through to motor control. In our system, information flow will be bidirectional. Control system parameters will be passed to the image sensor itself, guiding computational effort and reducing processing overheads. For example a rotational demand passed into the control system, will not only result in control actuation for vehicle movement, but will also result in optic tracking along the same path. A key component of the project will therefore be the management and control of information across all three layers: sensing, visual perception and control. Information share will occur at multiple rates and may either be scheduled or requested. Shared information and distributed computation will provide a breakthrough in control capabilities for highly agile robotic systems. Whilst applicable to a very wide range of disciplines, our system will be tested in the demanding field of autonomous aerial robotics. We will integrate the new vision sensors onboard an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), developing a control system that will fully exploit the new tracking capabilities. This will serve as a demonstration platform for the complete vision system, incorporating nonlinear algorithms to control the vehicle through agile manoeuvres and rapidly changing trajectories. Although specific vision tracking and control algorithms will be used for the project, the hardware itself and system architecture will be applicable to a very wide range of tasks. Any application that is currently limited by tracking capabilities, in particular when combined with a rapid, demanding control challenge would benefit from this work. We will demonstrate a step change in agile, vision-based control of UAVs for exploration, and in doing so develop an architecture which will have benefits in fields as diverse as medical robotics and industrial production.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.