UK organisation the Robotics Growth Partnership (RGP) has published a new 64-page report outlining its vision of what it calls the cyber-physical infrastructure (CPI).

The CPI is the bringing together of physical and digital tools to help accelerate organisations’ innovation processes and reduce the cost and risk of rapid prototyping, product testing, and developing ideas.

Published on 11 February, the report recognises that organisations with the right tools, models, and simulations will be the most able to adapt and respond at pace and scale.

Technologies include robotics, smart machines, synthetic environments, digital twins, AI, semantic maps, and living labs.

The report outlines recipes for using them, including systems and ecosystem thinking, the technologies’ socio-technical aspects, plus agility, federation, modularity, platforms, smart services, and ‘CPI thinking’.

The context is the “quickening pace of technological change, and the ways in which the pandemic has demonstrated the significance of data – particularly real-time data for national systems and infrastructure”, according to a statement from the government.

The RGP itself was established by government in 2019, with the aim of putting the UK at “the cutting edge of the global smart robotics revolution”.

The organisation brings together representatives from industry, academia, and government to determine how smart machines will be able to support the UK’s economic recovery, build resilience to future shocks, and help achieve policy objectives such as Build Back Stronger and Net Zero.

Whitehall believes national implementation of the CPI would build on and complement other national strategies, including the National Data Strategy, the AI Strategy, the Innovation Strategy, and the 10-Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution.

The report describes the CPI is the “coming wave of networked virtual and physical tools that are as accessible as the Web”:

“It fundamentally changes how and where we develop and use sensors, machines, systems, applications, and infrastructure. It enables us to seamlessly function simultaneously in both the virtual and real worlds as we ideate, design, develop, test, adapt, certify, deploy, repurpose, interact with, and maintain every different kind of sensor or machine, anywhere.”

It explains how organisations can blend the virtual and physical worlds to design and experiment quickly and safely in virtual spaces before operating in the real world.

“It enables richer visualisation and understanding during operation leading to better maintenance, fewer failures, less downtime and less risk. And it brings secondary benefits, such as services for human control and comprehensive synthetic data sets to initially train artificial intelligence before real world use.”

In the CPI, “virtual models and physical components are not monolithically constructed, they are federated over networks in the virtual world and as modular units in the physical world. This brings flexibility to reconfigure and repurpose at pace.

“Whereas in the World Wide Web we use text string search to find information, in the CPI we use query to ask questions, and semantics to reason over the network and find answers. Machines and people working together in the CPI are systems in an ecosystem who provide smart services to others and so realise economic, environmental and societal benefits.”

All of this will lead to a step change in UK productivity, claims the report – a key challenge for the UK over the past decade of flatlining productivity growth.

In a letter to David Lane and Paul Clarke, Co-Chairs of the Robotics Growth Partnership, Minister for Science, Research & Innovation, George Freeman MP, wrote: “The role of technology and innovation is critical to the UK’s recovery from the pandemic as well as our long-term growth.

“I was very pleased to read your compelling vision for how a national capability in CPI to develop and connect robots and smart machines could contribute to these objectives, accelerating the innovation process and enhancing national resilience through improved strategic planning and the ability to respond to shocks.”

He added: “There are of course a number of important policy and affordability questions to consider, to help government make informed choices about its own potential role in this ecosystem and to ensure we are creating an environment where academia and industry can co-invest, innovate and flourish.

“It is therefore crucial that we build on the valuable engagement and dialogue you have undertaken to date.”