James and Salah have been awarded, together with colleagues from COM, EEE and MAC, international academic partners including MIT, Boston University and the Technical University of Darmstadt, and industry partners including NVIDIA and Siemens, a major EPSRC International Centre-to-Centre Research Collaborations grant for “Machine Intelligence with Robot Swarms for Underground Operations.” The project will receive £1.44m in funding to Sheffield, including £388,640 apportioned to COM.

The grant will support research into computationally efficient machine intelligence for robot swarms operating in underground environments where GPS and communication are limited or unavailable. Inspired by collective behaviours in nature, the project aims to enable autonomous robot swarms to inspect and maintain buried water pipe infrastructure, with potential applications across tunnels, cable conduits and other challenging subterranean environments.

Lab spinout Opteran, the brain-biomimicry company, has secured £10m in Seed+ funding to scale up its Natural Intelligence technology. The funding round, led by Join, included IQ Capital, Episode 1, Seraphim, and newly-established fund Northern Gritstone.

The latest round of investment takes Opteran’s total private investment up to over £12m, enabling it to continue taking IP developed within the lab to market, as well as developing new IP of its own.

Read more about the funding announcement at Sky News.