The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) funds projects across the full spectrum of R&D disciplines, approaches, and institutions. To support scientific and technological breakthroughs outside of programmes, ARIA Programme Directors can award opportunity seeds to support ambitious research aligned to the opportunity spaces they’ve identified.

The opportunity space, Smarter Robot Bodies, led by Programme Director Jenny Read aims to develop breakthrough technologies capable of interfacing with the human brain at the circuit level, across distributed brain regions and with cell type specificity.

Proposals are invited to:

• Create one or more novel robotic manipulators, demonstrating a dexterous ability that far exceeds what’s possible today or likely to be achieved by existing approaches; substantial improvements over the status quo in both performance and robustness, while not introducing any deal breakers in terms of cost, size, infrastructure or scalability.
• Develop new techniques for designing robotic hardware and control software.
• Produce advances in relevant technologies such as actuation and haptic sensing.

Applications are welcome from across the R&D ecosystem, including:

• Individuals (including those not affiliated with an organisation).
• Universities and other research institutions (including proposals from students, postdocs and staff).
• Startups and companies (small, medium and large).
• Charities, not-for-profits and public sector research organisations.