Thales autonomy experts
Meet some of the team helping Thales to deliver an autonomous future
We have spoken with four of our autonomy experts who share their roles within Thales and the different aspects of autonomy that they are involved in. We look into what led them here from Masters’s degrees in space science to studying in the Antarctic. Let’s delve a little deeper into the people helping to deliver a truly autonomous future…
Ben Pritchard - C4I Research & Concepts Lead
What University did you attend and what did you study?
I studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College. Throughout university, I increasingly specialised in robotics and software algorithms, culminating in my MEng thesis on ‘biologically inspired robotics’, which became a chess-playing robot arm!
What is your role at Thales in driving an Autonomous future?
I am the Chief Technologist in the Autonomy Technology Centre, which means I am responsible for understanding our long-term business ambitions and shaping an autonomy research strategy for achieving those technical outcomes.
It’s such a broad field that not even the 80,000-people strong Thales team could do it all alone, so it’s very much a collaborative activity. A large part of my role is therefore at the University interface, driving strategic partnerships and project collaborations that allow us to perform and commercialise the academic research into industrial use.
In particular, I helped to define what because the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub, based at the University of Southampton, and now support its Executive Management Team deliver on this £33m “big idea” for the EPSRC (part of UKRI, part of BEIS).
We also looked at how humans could work most effectively in these new human-machine teams
What is your experience and expertise that qualifies you to have this role?
I have worked for Thales for 18 years and have benefited from jobs in many different sites, application domains and roles throughout that time.
Whilst working in our Transportation Systems business, we started to grapple with ‘autonomous trains’, understanding the potential value and pitfalls for evolving from ‘highly automated’ to ‘autonomous’ functions, for these safety critical systems.
From 2017, I returned to the world of corporate research and created the new Autonomous Systems Research Group. Here, I led the team that explored research challenges including how to verify and validate autonomous systems and how we could effectively plan increasingly complex missions for these uncrewed vehicles, such as maintaining offshore windfarms. We also looked at how humans could work most effectively in these new human-machine teams and how synthetic environments would help to join all these activities together and reduce the time to market for new capabilities.
During 2020-2022 I was the grateful recipient of a Royal Academy of Engineering Industrial Fellowship, which enabled me to be part-time seconded into the University of Southampton. This allowed me to lead a collaborative research project there, creating a new means of supervising squads of maritime autonomous systems working collaboratively.
What part of autonomy are you involved in?
I work in our corporate centre, which means there is potential for us to get into everything that Thales does: from the bottom of the ocean to the upper atmosphere and even further into space, as well as across cyberspace.
What binds it all together is that we deal with critical systems. We handle the decisive moments for mission and safety-critical systems throughout the world. As we introduce autonomous functions and uncrewed vehicles into these critical systems, there are fundamental challenges that need to be first understood and ultimately overcome. My role is to work across industry, government, and academia, to help share this awareness, and then enable Thales to bring the appropriate capabilities to market in the future.
What considerations are at the heart of what you (and your team) do?
There are two main points that our whole team constantly remind people.
Firstly, that these so-called “uncrewed systems” are not uncrewed! Even into the future, there will remain lots of people involved in the design and operation of autonomous vehicles and other uncrewed systems. The people have just moved.
Secondly, that these “uncrewed systems” are still just complex systems! They still require all the same diligence and governance for good systems engineering that they did before. In fact, the ‘design space’ gets harder, so we need even more systems engineering than before, not less.
The messy complexities of the real world (and real human) interactions mean that safe, reliable, trustworthy deployment of these technologies for safety-critical applications remains some way off.
These collaborative relationships, with humans interacting with autonomous ‘AI agents’ as peers, not as dumb tools, will be a step change for our design capabilities.
Can you leave us with one thought as to what you think an autonomous future looks like?
Our autonomous future will be collaborative. In everything we have studied there is always a human involved: somebody, somewhere must care about the results of a task. Otherwise, what’s the point?
These collaborative relationships, with humans interacting with autonomous ‘AI agents’ as peers, not as dumb tools, will be a step change for our design capabilities.
Natasha Dell - Senior Algorithms Engineer
What is your role at Thales in driving an Autonomous future?
I am currently leading the delivery of cutting-edge software solutions to the UK MOD and other customers. I develop these solutions using image detection algorithms to provide increased situational awareness. The wider remit is that we’re creating a safer future for our armed forces through autonomy and we’re pushing this and making it a reality right here, right now.
What is your experience and expertise that qualifies you to have this role?
My background is in Physics, and I have worked in developing software for seven years. My current role as a Senior Algorithms Engineer involves leading software and systems architecture design, implementing code for projects and assisting with the deployment of machine learning algorithms onto embedded hardware.
I attended the University of Southampton, where the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Hub (TAS) is based, and completed my Masters in Physics. I did an undergrad in Physics and then completed my Masters specialising in Space Science. My thesis used magnetic data from the sun’s magnetic field to predict when the Earth would experience the highest levels of magnetic activity, allowing good predictions of when the northern (and southern) lights could be seen.
What part of autonomy are you involved in?
I am currently working on how we can use AI to assimilate and utilise data captured by cameras and sensors on autonomous vehicles (AV). An example of which is processing live video to increase the situational awareness of an unmanned ground vehicle in use.
We can provide information on a safe passageway if you were in a manned vehicle following an AV. My job would be to look at applications to see if they can fit on the hardware, look at how it would look from a user perspective and dealing with video bandwidth. We look at what a user would want to know about if they were sending out an AV and what info they’d want to get back from it.
We use an internal algorithm that the team have written and then I work at integrating it with software. Once we get the information out of it, it’s a case of how we display that information.
It doesn’t matter what sort of AV you’re using. The software can run on any vehicle with a camera fitted. It’s more about using the information feed from the sensors to inform decisions. The algorithms can be used on any video feed fitted to any vehicle, it is pretty agnostic to the platform, as long as the data can be processed and displayed in a useful way to a user.
User trust is paramount with anything autonomous. If Google Maps sends you the wrong way, then you won’t trust it anymore. It must perform 100% better than a person.
Through your experience of working with autonomy AI, how have you seen it change since your time at Thales? How are the applications changing?
User trust is paramount with anything autonomous. If Google Maps sends you the wrong way, then you won’t trust it anymore. It must perform 100% better than a person. People are more forgiving to a person than they are to a machine. People expect technology to be perfect. Quite reasonably they expect autonomy to be totally fail safe because it’s a ‘machine’.
What considerations are at the heart of what you (and your team) do?
We look at how we can best assist the user by providing them with the right amount of information in the right way. The last thing we want to do is confuse the user with too much unnecessary information. We want to ease the cognitive burden of the user and let the AI get on with jobs to free up a human user to do other things that only a human can do.
Do you have a quote that you can give us that puts your more subjective spin what you think an autonomous future looks like?
I believe autonomy definitely is the future for us at Thales, there’s so many ways it can be utilised; we just need to make sure that we use it in the best way for our users, to make their job easier and safer.
Iain Carrie - Head of Digital Strategy
What is your role at Thales in driving an Autonomous future?
I was previously Chief Technologist for Land Autonomy delivering R&D and strategy for land vehicles and “atmospheric littoral” air vehicles.
I am now Head of Digital Strategy, which of course includes elements of autonomy. My role makes sure our services and products are compatible with customers’ needs, which includes future autonomous systems.
I am the annoying voice in every meeting making sure we are thinking about how our products will be used in all domains and how we can ensure simple, multi-domain integration of our products. We no longer design a sensor or algorithms for one use. The days of siloed land, sea and air domains are well and truly behind us.
What is your experience and expertise that qualifies you to have this role?
I have a history of field research out in the wild during my PhD, including partnering with The British Antarctic Survey as part of their Collaborative Gearing Scheme. My research was around how algorithms on imaging satellites perform when viewing the ocean.
I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time at sea around the UK and Antarctica during my PhD. This taught me a huge amount about trials and fieldwork and how to be prepared for all eventualities. During my time at Thales and other engineering companies, I have continued to be a trials specialist and have been very lucky with the amount of travel I have managed. -30˚ C in the Arctic Circle one month then +35˚ C in Cyprus a few months later was a particularly good year.
At the moment, Autonomy seems to be 20 percent planning for the future and 80 percent trialling, improving, iterating, making mistakes and learning. I have a background in algorithms and vehicle systems research, but I think one of the more important aspects is to be able to work with customers and end users because, as clichéd as it sounds, we are all on a journey. Absolutely no one has all the answers.
My role is now slightly broader, and I am concerned with delivering digital products and autonomy into real projects in land, sea and air, to show how these can add real value.
What part of autonomy are you involved in?
For the past few years, I have been involved in land autonomy which included trials, development, R&D and working with the customers. My role is now slightly broader, and I am concerned with delivering digital products and autonomy into real projects in land, sea and air, to show how these can add real value. I still have that end user and customer interaction most days which heavily influences the direction of our product development.
Did you come into Thales with a view on Autonomy or has engineering found its way into Autonomy?
I joined Thales long before autonomy was seriously being considered as a realistic goal. My background in image processing and vehicle systems meant it was a natural step for me once autonomy work ramped up a few years ago. We have been working on our Digital Crew™ product for a few years. Digital Crew is a perfect product for autonomy given it’s AI content and decision support toolset.
Can you leave us with one thought as to what you think an autonomous future looks like?
At the moment the world tends to consider autonomy as a parallel activity. This strange little area where scientists and engineers are “playing” with interesting and cool robots. This is not the right view in my opinion. Autonomy will heavily influence and impact all major programmes sooner than we think. It will be at the core of all major programmes and products. It is important that we understand what we design and how these designs could be enhanced and/or constrained in the future.
Chris Shepherd – Autonomy Technology Centre Director
What university did you attend and what did you study?
I attended the University of Leeds and studied Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering with Management.
What is your role at Thales in driving an Autonomous future?
I’m the Founder and Director of the Autonomy Technology Centre. Helping develop the expertise across the organisation to deliver that future ambition. Also ensuring coherence across different Thales business lines. Supporting strategy development process proving to ensure we deliver autonomous systems in a safe and ethical way. Guiding collaboration with other organisations. And to learn by doing bringing our R&D to life.
Proving to ensure we deliver autonomous systems in a safe and ethical way. Guiding collaboration with other organisations.
What is your experience and expertise that qualifies you to have this role?
Mainly as a Project Manager to run complex projects from a diverse skills base. I also worked in a tiger team on MMCM helping rebaseline the project. Then I was UK capture lead for the NMCM bid (which we lost sadly), ran the Mine warfare sector for a year and then did a 2 year secondment in UK Defence solutions centre where I learned about technology exploitation, collaboration and technology strategy and roadmapping. Then came back to lead the ATC.
What considerations are at the heart of what you (and your team) do?
Ensuring the customer gets what they need. Ukraine has exposed the importance of remaining technically current and if we can help ensure the security of our country and our allies by developing technology that is robust, resilient and safe – we can then provide the military the force multiplication they required from uncrewed systems as well as taking people out of dull dangerous and dirty environments. With a focus on more than technology, turning robots and drones into a capability requires us to constantly work on human machine teaming, the operational context and every aspect of PESTLE and DLODs.
Safe, fast and impactful technology that the users can rely on. Removing the fragility of uncrewed technology!
Do you have a quote that you can give us that puts your more subjective spin what you think an autonomous future looks like?
It’ll be transitionary, much like adoption of smart phones, VR gaming, electric vehicles. Augmentation of our day to day lives will be enhanced through automation at the pace of acceptance and impact so we can maximise our effort on where we can provide greatest value.