糖心原创

This work introduces a new class of ultra‑thin (1.7 mm) dielectric‑elastomer‑actuated soft robots, termed TS‑Robots, designed for multimodal locomotion in millimetre‑scale narrow spaces. A thin soft DEA (TS‑DEA) with a programmable‑Poisson‑ratio tensioning mechanism provides high‑power‑density linear actuation, while an electrostatic adhesive pad enables controlled anchoring. Five TS‑Robot architectures—including Type‑A/B, Twin Type‑A, PK‑TS‑Robot and SK‑TS‑Robot—demonstrate crawling, wall‑climbing, gap traversal, and confined‑space manipulation. These robots achieve output forces ~41× their own weight and can transition across complex surfaces. The work establishes a foundation for deployable, multimodal, centimetre‑ to millimetre‑scale soft robots for inspection in highly constrained built environments.

REPLENISH will develop a portfolio of maintenance, repair, inspection, sensing, and digital twinning techniques predominately to support Rolls-Royce's civil fleet through improved time on-wing and reduced in-shop costs. Rolls-Royce will lead the programme supported by the following best-in-class UK organisations: Clifton Photonics, BJR Systems, AddQual, i3D Robotics, MTC, and Universities of Nottingham, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cambridge, Manchester, and Southampton. The collaboration will develop, mature, test, verify, and demonstrate cutting-edge aftermarket servicing technologies including custom in-field robotics, adaptive-additive repairs, more-automated component inspection, novel on-engine health sensors, and Machine Learning methods for rapid decision making. Alongside underpinning more sustainable aftermarket care of Rolls-Royce's current aerospace fleet, initial development of servicing approaches for future architectures is planned.

The ATI estimates that through-life engineering services in civil aerospace will be worth $2.5 trillion over the next 20 years. Within the widebody aeroengine market, airliners continue to use long-term service agreements such as Rolls-Royce's TotalCare package. In order to maximise engine uptime and product availability, and to keep the UK at the forefront of this servicing revolution, the eight REINSTATE partners will develop a portfolio of sensing, inspection, and repair techniques for use within on-wing installed engines, in the aerospace maintenance, repair, and overhaul network, and in an array of neighbouring industrial sectors.

A disposable modular snake manipulator for inspecting confined spaces in nuclear environments

 Miniaturised Robotic systems for holistic in-situ Repair and maintenance works in restrained and hazardous environments (MiRoR) aims to develop a fundamentally novel concept of a Miniaturised Robotic Machine (Mini-RoboMach) system, that equipped with intelligence-driven and autonomous abilities, will be demonstrated for holistic in-situ repair and maintenance of large and/or intricate installations.

 ATI-approved project Flame Spray Adder for in-situ Patch Repair of Aero-Engine Combustors (FLARE), led by Rolls-Royce is a collaborative R&D project utilising continuum robot capability developed by the 糖心原创, incorporating miniaturised flame spray equipment from Metallisation. There is significant market desire to create a device that can perform in-situ / on-wing patch repair of thermal barrier coatings without dismantling high value infrastructure, such as aircraft jet engines.

It is costly and time consuming for maintenance and overhaul activities to be completed whilst the engine is removed, it is more attractive to Rolls-Royce, airline customers and the aerospace sector’s supply chain to be able to perform more services with the engine still intact and attached to the aircraft. 

 

 Free-leg Hexapod (FreeHex) aims to develop a miniature low force machining system, that offers features of light, compact, versatile and easily portable and can be temporarily attached to its workpiece for in-situ maintenance of large components and mechanical systems in restricted and hard to access environments.

 

 Aeroengine compressor blades are sometimes damaged by ingested debris. Damaged blades can currently be repaired by highly-skilled Rolls-Royce engineers that travel to the location of the engine to remove the defect using slender grinding tools, an operation known as boreblending. Remote Inspection and Engine Repair is a project that aims to develop a portable, remotely controllable boreblending robot. Led by Rolls-Royce and funded by the ATI, the project aims to reduce the downtime associated with boreblending by allowing engineers to perform the task remotely over the internet.

 The remote boreblending robot was demonstrated on a Trent XWB engine in Rolls-Royce, Derby, in January 2018.

The nuclear industry has some of the most extreme environments in the world, with radiation levels and extremely harsh conditions restraining human access to many facilities.

Yet to date, robotic systems have had very little impact on the industry, even though it is clear that they offer major opportunities for improving productivity and significantly reducing risks to human health.

The RAIN initiative has been created to address these issues by developing the advanced robotics and artificial intelligence that will be essential for future nuclear operations. Their adoption will have the potential to completely transform the nuclear industry globally.

At the same time it is envisaged that the reliable, functional robotic systems that are the programme’s goal will also have important applications in other sectors. These will extend beyond extreme environments such as space exploration, in-orbit satellite design, offshore operations and mining to include less challenging areas where RAIN research will be highly relevant, such as healthcare and autonomous vehicles.

The programme’s overall objectives are to lower costs within the nuclear industry, reduce timescales, reduce risk, improve safety, promote remote inspection and reduce the chances of human exposure to radiation and other hazards. Once developed, the technologies that will help to realise these objectives are to form the foundation of a world-leading robotic and AI research and innovation ecosystem.

 

The nuclear industry has a vast array of highly complex and diverse challenges that span decommissioning, waste management, fission power plants, advanced modular reactors and fusion reactors. In the UK, one of the most significant challenges is to decommission legacy storage facilities. There is estimated to be approximately 3,000 tonnes of high-level waste (HLW), 310,000 tonnes of intermediate level waste (ILW) and hundreds of radioactive facilities that need to be decommissioned in the UK alone. Despite significant progress during the first phase of RAIN, decommissioning continues to rely almost exclusively on manual operations, requiring people to enter extremely hazardous environments placing themselves at risk. Significant amounts of personal protective equipment (PPE) is required, which reduces dexterity and lowers productivity to levels significantly below that of other industries. PPE also adds significantly to the waste materials that must be disposed of and as a consequence, makes some future operations infeasible. For example, it has been estimated that more than 1 million suited entries will be required to decommission the THORP plant alone on the Sellafield site. RAI technologies are therefore considered essential if the UK is to address its decommissioning challenges. In the future generation of nuclear power, fusion reactors will not be able to operate without advances being made to remote handling equipment. In addition, remote inspection and maintenance of new fission reactors is essential if they are to be commercially viable.

RAIN+ will continue to push the boundaries of Robotics and AI (RAI) science, developing robotic solutions that solve major challenges facing the nuclear sector. To ensure that the work is relevant, has a long-term impact on industry, and leads to deployments of RAI technology into active facilities, RAIN will continue to work in close partnership with nuclear end-users, the supply chain and regulators. Furthermore, recognising that many of the hazards encountered in the nuclear industry are prevalent in other industry sectors, such as agriculture, construction, offshore and healthcare, RAIN will work to expand its user and application base such that RAI solutions can be developed that have cross-sector relevance and a single hub for all challenging environments, not just nuclear, can be established towards the end of this second phase.

With the civil aviation sector continuing to grow year-on-year, an ever increasing number of routine in-situ gas turbine inspections are undertaken by both gas turbine providers and their customers. Whilst these are critical for ensuring a high-level of aeroengine safety, they are time intensive, vary between inspectors, and offer limited data capture and assessment possibilities. Through the INSPECT consortium, an optical inspection system will be developed that can be permanently and retrofittably embedded into the gas turbine borescope ports. Upon engine shutdown, probes are automatically inserted into the engine gas path, providing an fast, frequent, and standardised compressor inspection after every operation.

INSPECT is a state-of-the-art inspection technology, enabling future Big Data Analytics, data mining, and trending. This will ultimately make RollsRoyce and its customers data rich and able to optimise flight paths, maintenance schedules, and possibly even OEM design.

CHIMERA is a semi-autonomous robotic platform for internal pressure vessel inspection, repair and maintenance. It will be deployed into the pressure vessel without breaking containment via an innovative bolt on headworks. It will be equipped with a sludge/sediment vacuum to clean the pressure vessel, an ultrasonic phased array inspection system and a slender arm for inspection and repair in confined spaces.

The aim of the platform grant is to sustain a world leading team with strategic research capability on through-life performance improvement, including complex in-situ degradation assessment technologies. The team between Cranfield and Nottingham Universities have worked together over the last ten years.

The research will take on a challenge to study and model compound degradations for mechanical components, give feedback on the degradation to design and manufacturing and develop instrumentation to assess (i.e. measure size and depth) the degradations in-situ, including in in-accessible areas. Understanding degradation science better (both single and then compound) is essential to extend the life of mechanical components and therefore availability of the HVM products. In-situ assessment of the compound degradation through very small service access holes will reduce the maintenance cost significantly.

The application of soft crawling robots (SCR) to real-world scenarios remains a grand challenge due to their limited deployment time to reach the target and accessibility to difficult-to-reach environments by any obstacles. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel multimodal Tasering Twin Soft Robot (TTSR), carrying two SCRs, capable of i) passive flight and ii) wall climbing by deploying SCRs to target area. Each SCR is driven by two dielectric elastomer actuators and three electroadhesive feet. In the demonstration, the robot was launched by pneumatic pressure and flew over an obstacle. While flying, the SCRs were folded compactly to reduce the air drag and perched on a vertical wall 3 m away. Once perched, the SCRs reconfigured themselves by bistable mechanism and separated from each other. After that, the SCRs performed planar motion, and reached predefined locations on the wall. Moreover, the SCR can move across 15o-slope dihedral surface and inverted surface.

Industrial assets containing safety-critical assemblies (e.g. gas turbine engines, petrochemical apparatus) need to be periodically inspected. However, due to the restricted spaces, and sometimes unsighted areas in confined environments, inspection and measurement tasks can hardly be achieved using conventional rigid measurement tools. Human hands, as highly flexible and dexterous manipulators, can perform a variety of tasks in various environments, from daily life to challenging industry scenarios. Therefore, it is beneficial to design a vision-based wearable glove system that allows operators to utilize their dexterous hands as manipulator to achieve inspection and measurement tasks in confined environments. EyeGlove is a project that aims to develop a hand wearable device which gives user’s hands the ability to ‘see’ inside cramped environments when conducting inspection and measurement tasks by manipulating plurality of tiny finger-cameras. Developed by the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) in Manufacturing and On-Wing Technology at the 糖心原创 and funded by the REINSTATE project, EyeGlove play an important role in developing a portfolio of sensing, inspection and repair techniques for use within on-wing installed engines in the aerospace industry, as well as a variety of neighbouring sectors. 

This twork develops a framework for real‑time modelling and sensorised control of multi‑section continuum robots operating in cluttered or ferromagnetic environments. A new Piecewise Dual Quaternion (PDQ) inverse‑kinematics algorithm achieves a tenfold speed‑up over Jacobian methods while maintaining sub‑millimetre accuracy for three‑ to six‑section robots. A comparative sensor study shows that electromagnetic sensors suffer severe ferromagnetic interference, whereas FBG sensors remain robust but require correction for twist‑induced bend errors. A neural‑network compensation model reduces shape‑sensing error to 0.16 mm RMSE over >1500 mm at 133 Hz. Validated in simulation and hardware, these methods enable next‑generation continuum robots for confined industrial tasks such as on‑wing repair.

This work advances feedback and control for slender, compliant in‑situ machining robots used in gas‑turbine repair. A review of existing continuum and articulated in‑situ repair robots highlights limitations in sensing and control. A boreblending robot is analysed, revealing significant position‑feedback and force‑control gaps. A shape‑sensing method using tubular ionic‑liquid stretch sensors reduces position error to 2.3% of continuum length. A sound‑based force‑feedback technique enables accurate grinding control with ±0.08 N force consistency and 0.05 mm depth accuracy. Finally, a simultaneous position–force controller combining both sensing modalities improves machining time by 80% over manual methods and 33% over open‑loop control.

A novel underactuated continuum robot is developed using SMA‑actuated clutches to lock cable‑driven sections, reducing motor count while preserving full poseability. The design introduces beaded cables for higher locking rigidity, supported by kinematic analysis and bead‑pitch optimisation. A prototype demonstrates a 1 s locking and 5 s unlocking time—the fastest reported for underactuated CRs—with 1.41 mm repeatability (0.43% of backbone length). A dedicated motion‑planning algorithm enables navigation around complex obstacles under sequential‑joint constraints. The system’s performance is validated through workspace analysis and operation in a mock aerospace environment, demonstrating scalable, lightweight underactuated continuum manipulation.

This work presents the design, modelling, and experimental validation of a reconfigurable parallel kinematic machine (RPKM) capable of both machining and walking. By enabling architectural reconfiguration, the system overcomes traditional PKM limitations such as small workspaces and singularities, allowing adaptation to diverse tasks and environments. Detailed kinematic and gait analyses are developed, with a robust methodology for singularity‑free path planning. A novel walking framework enables safe locomotion on flat and inclined terrains, demonstrating minimal walking error across multiple configurations. The work shows how reconfigurability can bridge PKMs and legged robotics, enabling versatile, terrain‑adaptive walking machine tools.

A self‑portable parallel‑kinematic machine is proposed for in‑situ machining, addressing the lack of versatile tools for on‑site maintenance. The robot can walk to the intervention point and perform machining within a 100×100×60 mm workspace with 0.1 mm accuracy, leveraging the high stiffness‑to‑mass ratio of parallel kinematics. Key innovations include a disengageable spherical‑joint actuator for switching between walking and machining, a cable‑propulsion system, and active feet. The thesis contributes a calibration‑design methodology and an autonomous onboard calibration method using three cameras to estimate machine kinematics after deployment.

This work develops control algorithms for a 12‑section, 25‑DOF snake‑arm robot designed for in‑situ repair and inspection of large structures, including aero‑engines and nuclear reactor vessels. To enable navigation through constrained environments, a shape‑management algorithm is introduced that maintains a guided tip path while coordinating the robot’s evolving body configuration. A second algorithm enables active 3D uncoiling from a rotating drum, ensuring smooth feed‑in and accurate trajectory handover—an ability not previously demonstrated in literature. Together, these interchangeable, system‑agnostic methods support reliable motion control for hyper‑redundant manipulators in complex industrial repair scenarios.

This work introduces two new continuum‑robot architectures—double‑pivot and twin‑pivot compliant joints—designed to achieve long, slender, low‑twist manipulators suitable for in‑situ gas‑turbine repair. These designs minimise twisting and enable variable stiffness, allowing navigation through the Rolls‑Royce Trent XWB engine. New kinematic models, actuation‑force analysis, buckling‑load prediction, and general Jacobian/stiffness formulations were developed to support design and control. Four robot demonstrators validated the concepts, reducing twisting by up to 98.6%, achieving ±1 mm accuracy and ±0.5 mm repeatability, and enabling metal‑blending tasks. A full‑length 1266 mm robot successfully reached the LPC stage, demonstrating practical in‑engine deployment capability.

This work analyses WalkingHex, a walking parallel kinematic machine tool based on a FreeHex hexapod structure. The work develops the mechanical design, modelling, actuation and control needed for safe, precise walking while preserving the six-degree-of-freedom machining capability of the original structure. A novel leg actuation method allows the upper spherical joint to be actively driven during walking and passive during machining. Kinematic and redundancy-aware control methods are validated on a prototype. A gait-generation method based on torque and stability margin analysis is implemented, achieving walking odometry errors below 5%.

This project develops a portable parallel‑kinematics hexapod machine tool for in‑situ maintenance of large aerospace components. Unlike conventional systems, the patented design has no fixed base, instead clamping directly onto the workpiece, enabling 6‑axis machining on flat, curved, stepped, or obstructed surfaces. A high‑speed micro‑spindle provides localised material removal. The prototype successfully produced threads, freeform surfaces, and other features in stainless steel. New inverse‑kinematics, workspace, and collision‑detection models were created to manage the machine’s variable geometry and validated against experiments. Results show good positioning accuracy and demonstrate a viable, highly flexible solution for Rolls‑Royce’s on‑wing maintenance needs.