By Giles Brown
Philip Norman did not take a typical route into robotics.
In a long career he worked as an illustrator, author and artist before making his first forays into engineering and mechanics by designing toys.
Four years ago he moved to Cumbria, where he is now focused on reimagining some of the fundamentals of robotics for applications in the nuclear sector.
An English Literature graduate from Cambridge University, Norman was also a talented illustrator and began working for newspapers and magazines, including as the in-house caricaturist for the Times Literary Supplement during the 1980s.
He then turned his attention to writing and illustrating children’s books, including The Carrot War, which chronicles a battle for dominance over root vegetables between rabbits and hares.
For nearly 20 years he lived in France, near Toulouse, making a living as an illustrator and exhibiting and selling abstract landscape paintings.
A change of direction came when he wanted to design a 3D building toy for his son Oliver.
‘I wanted to design a toy for him because I thought the toys he already had weren’t very good,’ remembers Norman.
‘I came up with something that was much more modular and reconfigurable.’
Norman came close to selling his idea to toy company Hasbro, before a relative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pointed out the concept could be adapted for a modular robotics system.
This spawned the idea to return to the UK to set up Ross Robotics (Ross is Norman’s middle name) in Reading.
‘I only knew how to talk about robotics in French, I didn’t have the vocabulary in English and so I had to look it all up,’ Norman says.
Ross Robotics focuses on providing robotics to work on high voltage direct current (HVDC) connectors, which connect electricity networks between countries, monitoring their operation to prevent costly blackouts.
‘HVDC halls are being built around the world and the robots are becoming the de facto standard for monitoring them,’ says Norman.
‘They operate autonomously and can survive a permanent electrical storm.’
In 2021 Norman made the decision to step away from Ross Robotics and move to Cumbria with his wife Branwen to focus on designing robots via his new company Ross Innovation.
He set out to design a highly mobile robotic arm which could access and work in very confined spaces, such as those found in the nuclear industry.
‘Often these environments have been built, intentionally, so there is a very small aperture for entry and then lots of objects in close proximity to each other,’ he says.
‘They are very complex environments but it is too dangerous or impossible to send people into them.’
Norman’s solution has been to design his Re-Vector ‘singularity free’ robotic arm.
Since the 1950s, robotic arms have been designed using an x, y and z axis for the joints.
Although these robots can still have a high level of manoeuvrability, Norman says the design means they can reach a ‘singularity’.
‘There are certain parts of 3D space which they run into where they get stuck,’ he says.
‘Basically, the joints start to line up and the robot runs out of options. When this happens it is called a singularity.’
Until now these barriers have been overcome using technical workarounds or software.
However, Norman has used a combination of geometry and different varieties of joints to create a robotic arm where these singularities do not occur.
‘It behaves a bit like a snake and it can go into very confined spaces,’ he says.
Once in these spaces, the robot also has the capability to carry out tasks such as manipulation, cutting and lifting.
Norman, who works alongside two associate consultants, is in the process of discussing a variety of applications in the nuclear sector and says there is also potential in aerospace, the space sector and also for work on superyachts.
‘We’re doing some reinforcement learning for the robot, which improves its ability to path plan in confined spaces and we’re also doing some supervised learning tasks such as how to apply sealant in a seam,’ he says.
‘It can learn how to do things better and better and then that learning can be applied to specific applications.’
Norman taught himself Computer Aided Design (CAD) and has picked up the other necessary skills.
‘I’ve gradually assimilated lots of engineering and software skills,’ he says.
‘I am a generalist but I have specific skills and I can design things. I will look at challenges maybe from a totally different perspective and ask questions that no one else is asking.’
He believes his ability to get to the essence of a problem connects back to his work as a caricaturist and painter.
‘Caricaturing is about essentialising the characteristics of a human being and a good caricaturist accentuates in a truthful way,’ he says.
‘If there is a common thread it is looking for the thing that matters, the essential thing. This is why the singularity free robotics has emerged. I am looking for the essential characteristics.
‘By looking for something that was extremely versatile in 3D space I have come up with a solution to the problem.’
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