Industries

Where frontier capability
meets the physical world

Labs works best where AI has to touch something real — a site, a fleet, a line, a network. That's where the gap between demo and deployable is widest, and where a robotics lab earns its keep.

Logistics & warehousing

The frontier is already on the shop floor. Most of it doesn't work yet.

Vision-guided picking, autonomous mobile robots and demand forecasting with frontier models are all real and all uneven. The question isn't whether to adopt, it's which claims survive contact with your SKUs, your lighting and your peak.

Picking & handling

What current grippers and vision stacks can actually pick from your range, tested on your items in our lab.

Yard & fleet

Where perception models are reliable enough to run unsupervised, and where they aren't yet.

Planning & forecasting

Frontier-model forecasting against your data, benchmarked honestly against what you already run.

Manufacturing

Inspection, assembly and the shift from scripted to adaptive automation

Traditional automation is brittle: it does exactly what it was programmed to do. Frontier robotics is starting to handle variation. Knowing precisely where that line sits today, for your parts, is worth a great deal.

Quality inspection

On-device vision models for defect detection, tested on your parts before anyone talks about a rollout.

Adaptive assembly

Where learned manipulation beats scripted motion on high-mix, low-volume lines.

Maintenance intelligence

Frontier models over sensor and maintenance data — and the cases where they add nothing.

Utilities & energy

Inspection at scale, field work that's dangerous, and a regulator watching

Networks are large, physical and ageing. Drones, ground robots and vision-language models change what's inspectable and how often. Regulated organisations need the evidence before the pilot, not after.

Asset inspection

Imagery triage and defect detection with current models, benchmarked against your inspectors.

Field robotics

What ground and aerial platforms can do unsupervised in your environments, and what they can't.

Sovereign deployment

Running frontier models on infrastructure you control — the Edge platform is built for exactly this.

Infrastructure & construction

Sites are unstructured. That's the hardest problem in robotics and the biggest prize.

Progress monitoring, survey, and site robotics are advancing fast and failing quietly. Labs tells you which capabilities are ready for your sites and prototypes the ones that are close.

Progress & survey

Automated capture and comparison against plan with current perception models.

Site robotics

Honest assessment of mobile platforms in mud, dust and changing layouts.

Safety intelligence

Vision models for hazard detection — precision, recall and the cost of being wrong.

Agriculture

Seasonal, outdoor, variable: the proving ground for embodied AI

Agricultural robotics has moved from trials to early deployment. The difference between vendors is enormous and hard to see from a brochure. We test in the lab and in the field, and tell you what we found.

Perception in the field

Crop, weed and condition detection with frontier vision models under real light and weather.

Selective handling

Where grippers and manipulation are good enough for delicate produce, and where they aren't yet.

Vendor due diligence

Independent evaluation of the platforms pitching to you, from people who build the same things.

Public sector

Frontier capability with sovereignty, accountability and the public in the room

Public bodies need to understand frontier AI and robotics without becoming dependent on the vendors selling it. An independent monthly view, grounded in a UK lab and deployable on sovereign infrastructure, is a different starting point.

Independent horizon scanning

A monthly report your leadership can rely on, written by people with no product to sell you.

Sovereign deployment

Prototypes and production systems on UK infrastructure under your control.

Physical services

Inspection, maintenance and field operations where robotics is becoming viable.

Don't see your industry?

The list above is where we've looked hardest so far. If your organisation has to make AI work in the physical world, we'd like to hear about it.