Silicon Photonics is a field that has seen rapid growth and dramatic changes in the past 5 years. According to the MIT Communications Technology Roadmap, which aims to establish a common architecture platform across market sectors with a potential $20B in annual revenue, silicon photonics is among the top ten emerging technologies. This has in part been a consequence of the recent involvement of large semiconductor companies in the USA such as Intel and IBM, who have realised the enormous potential of the technology, as well as large investment in the field by DARPA in the USA under the Electronic and Photonic Integrated Circuit (EPIC) initiative. Significant investment in the technology has also followed in Japan, Korea, and to a lesser extent in the European Union (IMEC and LETI). The technology offers an opportunity to revolutionise a range of application areas by providing excellent performance at moderate cost due primarily to the fact that silicon is a thoroughly studied material, and unsurpassed in quality of fabrication with very high yield due to decades of investment from the microelectronics industry. The proposed work is a collaboration between 5 UK Universities (Surrey, St. Andrews, Leeds, Warwick and Southampton) with input from the industrial sector both in the UK and the USA. We will target primarily the interconnect applications, as they are receiving the most attention worldwide and have the largest potential for wealth creation, based on the scalability of silicon-based processes. However, we will ensure that our approach is more broadly applicable to other applications. This can be achieved by targeting device functions that are generic, and introducing specificity only when a particular application is targeted. The generic device functions we envisage are as follows: Optical modulation; coupling from fibre to sub-micron silicon waveguides; interfacing of optical signals within sub micron waveguides; optical filtering; optical/electronic integration; optical detection; optical amplification. In each of these areas we propose to design, fabricate, and test devices that will improve the current state of the art. Subsequently we will integrate these optical devices with electronics to further improve the state of the art in optical/electronic integration in silicon.We have included in our list of objectives, benchmark targets for each of our proposed devices to give a clear and unequivocal statement of ambition and intent.We believe we have assembled an excellent consortium to deliver the proposed work, and to enable the UK to compete on an international level. The combination of skills and expertise is unique in the UK and entirely complementary within the consortium. Further, each member of the consortium is recognised as a leading international researcher in their field.The results of this work have the potential to have very significant impact to wealth creation opportunities within the UK and around the world. For example emerging applications such as optical interconnect, both intra-chip, and inter-chip, as well as board to board and rack to rack, and Fibre To The Home for internet and other large bandwidth applications, will require highly cost effective and mass production solutions. Silicon Photonics is a seen as a leading candidate technology in these application areas if suitable performance can be achieved.

Energy plays a vital role in our lives, and during last 150 years civilization has increasing used fossil fuels / gas, coal and oil. As a result more and more difficult operating conditions, such as that in deviated or horizontal long-reach wells, become a norm within the drilling industry, and this requires better effectiveness and controllability of the downhole drilling processes. The latest research in this area confirmed that a basis for novel downhole drilling techniques of hard formations is founded upon imposing dynamic loading at the bit-rock interface. One way of practically realising this is a superposition of adjustable percussive loading on conventional rotary drilling. This method will allow adaptive operation across a wide range of drilled formations, so enhancing cutting rates while reducing tool wear and lending itself ideally to extended-reach horizontal drilling. A robust mathematical model of the dynamic interactions occurring in the borehole is the first and most important step in understanding how this philosophy can be applied. Apart from the dynamics of the percussive drilling module, which can be described as a system of non-smooth nonlinear ordinary differential equations, the model has to account for the damage zone in the borehole having a major influence on the dynamics of the drilling module. A significant research programme in this area comprising experimental and theoretical studies has been carried out at Aberdeen since 1998. These studies have been focussed to assess the practicality of a novel drilling method named as the resonance enhanced drilling, where the drill-bit operates in resonance conditions to increase the efficiency of generating controllable impact loading and consequently to create a sustainable damage zone in the borehole. Mathematical modelling of resonance enhanced drilling has been also part of these studies, and the latest work has been concentrated on the fracture dynamics of drilled formations, which is crucial for an accurate prediction of the system behaviour. It is proposed to take the current work a step further by developing a suite of robust models of the dynamic fracture. These models will be coupled with the dynamic model of the drill-bit in order to analyse the nonlinear interactions in the borehole. The development of such models will be the first major task of the project. Construction of the iterative maps for the percussive drilling will be the second major task. It has been understood that dimension reduction, and in particular construction of analytical iterative maps, would be especially beneficial for understanding and designing of the system described by non-linear piece-wise smooth equations as there are no well developed mathematical techniques for obtaining solutions for these systems and often there are difficulties even in proving the solution existence. The main advantage of iterative maps is that the computation of dynamic responses using the maps takes a fraction of time when compared to the techniques based on direct numerical integration. Also it is important that the dimension reduction achieved by constructing iterative maps means that the amount of data required for the system analysis is significantly decreased. The fast prediction of the system behaviour and reduced amount of data are both very useful for developing efficient control systems. Analysis of the system dynamics using the constructed iterative maps aims at formulation of optimal patterns of the external excitation, and in particular it will be focused on obtaining the frequencies and amplitudes of the percussive motion maximising drilling rates as functions of the drilled formation properties.

This research project is a psychologically-inspired investigation of an analogy of infant play as the central mechanism for autonomous, self-motivated robots that learn the local physics of their world. We note that infants and children at play exhibit exactly the kind of autonomous learning that would be very desirable in robotics. Infant play has a major role in the acquisition of new skills and cognitive growth. Noticing that early infants spend hours in play, we have designed a computer analogy of infant play and this project is an in-depth investigation into the use of play as a means of building subjective understanding of the physics of the local world. The project will implement a play generator algorithm on an iCub humanoid robot and perform experiments with a wide range of scenarios involving varieties of objects. This includes playing solitarily with objects to learn their properties, and interactive play with a human participant. We also include experiments with tool use (using one object as a tool for acting on another) to investigate how objects may become extensions of self. A panel of selected scientific experts on infants and play will provide their psychological expertise throughout the project and will also assist with the design of a series of matching experiments that will compare results from the robot model with those from selected psychological experiments on infants. The data from the experiments will be analysed and interpreted to shed light on a set of scientific issues. When we report on the results we will also extract some general principles for robot learning through play. We will examine the applicability of these principles in new robotic and intelligent systems developments. For example, we anticipate particular applications in areas such as assistive technology and home care where the re-programming of mass-produced systems is not feasible. We believe technology with a developmental approach will have wide implications and provide an alternative to "building robots" by establishing the idea of "developing robots" for applications.

Silicon Photonics is a field that has seen rapid growth and dramatic changes in the past 5 years. According to the MIT Communications Technology Roadmap, which aims to establish a common architecture platform across market sectors with a potential $20B in annual revenue, silicon photonics is among the top ten emerging technologies. This has in part been a consequence of the recent involvement of large semiconductor companies in the USA such as Intel and IBM, who have realised the enormous potential of the technology, as well as large investment in the field by DARPA in the USA under the Electronic and Photonic Integrated Circuit (EPIC) initiative. Significant investment in the technology has also followed in Japan, Korea, and to a lesser extent in the European Union (IMEC and LETI). The technology offers an opportunity to revolutionise a range of application areas by providing excellent performance at moderate cost due primarily to the fact that silicon is a thoroughly studied material, and unsurpassed in quality of fabrication with very high yield due to decades of investment from the microelectronics industry. The proposed work is a collaboration between 5 UK Universities (Surrey, St. Andrews, Leeds, Warwick and Southampton) with input from the industrial sector both in the UK and the USA. We will target primarily the interconnect applications, as they are receiving the most attention worldwide and have the largest potential for wealth creation, based on the scalability of silicon-based processes. However, we will ensure that our approach is more broadly applicable to other applications. This can be achieved by targeting device functions that are generic, and introducing specificity only when a particular application is targeted. The generic device functions we envisage are as follows: Optical modulation; coupling from fibre to sub-micron silicon waveguides; interfacing of optical signals within sub micron waveguides; optical filtering; optical/electronic integration; optical detection; optical amplification. In each of these areas we propose to design, fabricate, and test devices that will improve the current state of the art. Subsequently we will integrate these optical devices with electronics to further improve the state of the art in optical/electronic integration in silicon.We have included in our list of objectives, benchmark targets for each of our proposed devices to give a clear and unequivocal statement of ambition and intent.We believe we have assembled an excellent consortium to deliver the proposed work, and to enable the UK to compete on an international level. The combination of skills and expertise is unique in the UK and entirely complementary within the consortium. Further, each member of the consortium is recognised as a leading international researcher in their field.The results of this work have the potential to have very significant impact to wealth creation opportunities within the UK and around the world. For example emerging applications such as optical interconnect, both intra-chip, and inter-chip, as well as board to board and rack to rack, and Fibre To The Home for internet and other large bandwidth applications, will require highly cost effective and mass production solutions. Silicon Photonics is a seen as a leading candidate technology in these application areas if suitable performance can be achieved.

Condition monitoring is growing in popularity In industry with considerable sums now being spent on condition monitoring hardware and software. It is noted however that despite the significant rise In the profile of maintenance activities, and a burgeoning in the numbers and sophistication of condition monitoring equipment, systems continue to fail. Why is this? The single largest contributing factor Is that maintenance engineers lack a reliable way of prognosis. The aim of the project is to develop a modelling approach for fault detection, prognosis and subsequently maintenance decision making. The key technique we adopt Is what called a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) . It is a technique widely used in speech recognition and image segmentation.Here we assume the system monitored deteriorates according to a time/age dependent Markov process, but its state is unobservable. We furtherassume that the observed monitoring parameters is influenced by the underlying state of the system with random noise but not vice versus. A recursive filtering techniques is used to establish the initial fault detection and prognosis model based observed past history information. The model proposed will play a major role in condition based maintenance decision support, which in turn will save millions in UK industry if it proves to be valid.