The UK government has announced £40 million in funding for eight new robotics adoption hubs around the country, part of a push to get British businesses actually using robots rather than just researching them. The announcement came on 9 October from AI minister Kanishka Narayan.
Eight hubs, eight specialisms
Each hub focuses on a different sector. SHARP, the National Surgical Robotic Adoption Hub, will work on getting robotic surgery into more NHS operating theatres. HARVEST, based in Lincoln, targets farming and food production. A hub in Milton Keynes covers service robots, drones and self-driving vehicles. Wales gets its own manufacturing-focused hub, Hwb Llwybr Roboteg Cymru, alongside a second Welsh hub in the south of the country. There is also a National Waste and Recycling Robotics Adoption Hub, a Yorkshire hub and the Greater Southwest Robotic Adoption Hub.
Alongside the hubs, £1.7 million goes to a national coordinating body run jointly by The Welding Institute and Anglia Ruskin University, and £2.5 million funds twelve separate training projects designed to build up the skilled workforce robotics adoption will need.
Closing the adoption gap
Britain has never lacked robotics research. The problem has been getting that research out of universities and into factories, farms and hospitals, where firms often default to manual processes rather than risk the upfront cost of automation. The hubs are meant to sit in that gap, offering local businesses a place to trial robotics without betting the company on it.
The government's own estimate is striking: robotics could add £150 billion to the UK economy by 2035, up from around £6.4 billion today. That is a near twenty-five-fold increase, and it depends entirely on adoption rather than invention. The hubs join existing infrastructure including the National Robotarium in Edinburgh, the RAICo hub in Whitehaven, and the wider Catapult network.
Our take
The regional spread is the interesting part here. Rather than concentrating robotics investment in London and the golden triangle, this money is going to Lincoln, Yorkshire, Wales and the south west, places with strong farming, manufacturing and waste industries but not much track record in robotics funding. Whether £40 million spread across eight hubs is enough to shift an economy-wide adoption gap is a fair question. But as a statement of where the government wants robotics to actually show up, in operating theatres and farms rather than just demo videos, it is a sensible start.