HUman-machine teaming for Maritime Environments (HUME)

The offshore energy and defence sectors share a vision of the future where people are taken out of harsh, extreme environments and replaced by teams of smart robots able to do the 'dirty and dangerous jobs', collaborating seamlessly as a team with each other and with the human operators and experts on-shore. In this new world, remote data collection, fusion and interpretation become central, together with the ability to generate transparent, safe actionable decisions from this data. We propose the HUME project (HUman-machine teaming for Maritime Environments), whose vision is to develop a coherent framework that enables humans and machines to work seamlessly as a team by establishing and maintaining a single shared view of the world and each other's intents through transparent interaction, robust to a highly dynamic and unpredictable maritime environments. The HUME project's ambitious and fundamental research programme will address fundamental research questions in the field of machine-machine and human-machine collaboration, robot perception and explainable autonomy and AI.

The Prosperity Partnership would build on a 20 year strategic relationship between SeeByte and HWU, with SeeByte originally a spin-out of Heriot-Watt University in 2001 and now a world-leader in maritime autonomy worldwide in the Oil & Gas and Defence sectors. This grant would facilitate a shift to lower TRL research and development, providing seeding for early-stage research that can have a broad, longer-term and more disruptive impact. This proposed work aims at establishing a durable model, through which SeeByte and HWU can remain connected to foster long-term research relationships on projects of interest, as they emerge in this rapidly changing field.