Mindsheet – Mindsheet

Mindsheet Wins Innovation Of The Year Award

In association with the The News, Mindsheet has won ‘Innovation Of The Year Award’. The team were presented with the award at The News Business Excellence Awards ceremony in Portsmouth in January 2009.

The Awards were a chance to honour companies and organisations across the South East Hampshire region. The nine award categories reflected the merits of team work, community involvement, innovation and high achievement. Forty-eight entries made it onto the shortlist across all categories.

Innovation of the Year Trophy — Innovation of the Year Tropy

Amid such an amazing range of local business talent at the Gala Awards Dinner, we were happily surprised to win the Innovation of the Year category –

“For individuals or businesses which had shown a proclivity to ‘think outside the box’, becoming the first in their field to embark on a particular course of action, or having researched and developed a particularly novel and useful system or product”.

for our Testudo robot spy buggy – a remote control reconnaissance device that combat troops can send into enemy territory to scout for hazards.

The robot was developed in response to the 2008 MOD Grand Challenge. It gave us the perfect platform to demonstrate how we work with our customers to gain a deep understanding of their operations and behaviour. We specialise in helping companies develop breakthrough products and services in highly complex environments.

Throughout the exercise we involved soldiers with recent active service experience to guide the development so that it was soldier friendly and relevant. Following our success at the Grand Challenge we are in discussions with the MoD who recently agreed to fund the next stage of development.

Learn more about our exploits in the MOD Grand Challenge.

Mindsheet Grand Challenge

Mindsheet have designed a cooperative set of miniature autonomous surveillance vehicles with a top speed of 35MPH in response to the MOD Grand Challenge.

You are a Company or Platoon commander about to undertake an urban operation, which might culminate in contact with enemy forces. As you enter the urban terrain your views along main streets are relatively good, but are figures in the distance hostile or not? Elsewhere, your line-of-sight is blocked by walls, buildings, shrubbery and all the usual urban clutter, such as power and telephone poles and cables. What waits at the next intersection? What lies round the corner of the next building or concealed in houses or behind rooftop parapets?

Answering those questions is the crux of the MOD Grand Challenge. In response, Mindsheet have designed a cooperative set of miniature autonomous surveillance vehicles with a top speed of 35MPH. The vehicles are based on a rugged remote control toy platform.

Each vehicle can follow a pre-assigned mission plan and then wirelessly report back detected threats that may include: snipers, IEDs, militia and technicals to a base station. This allows the remote generation of situation reports without risk to ground troops who do not have to enter the hazard zone.

IED Bomb Inspection by Mindsheet Robot
Soldiers trial the Testudo robots for Improvised Explosive Device inspection.

Raglan Tribe demonstrates the Testudo robot to Vicki Butler-Henderson from the Channel 5 Fifth Gear show

The Testudo Robot in its early stages of design

chris-burgess — Chris Burgess operating the Ground Control Station

Mini-helicopters, flying saucers and robot buggies fight it out for war games prize

“We call it boys’ toys for warfare,” bellows Chris Burgess, as the hip-hop act Stromkern roars “Come Armageddon come” from the plasma screen behind him. On the video a radio-controlled buggy is zipping along a dusty street, its onboard camera swivelling left and right, on the lookout for snipers and roadside bombs that might lie ahead.
Burgess belongs to Mindsheet, one of 11 teams unveiled as finalists in the Ministry of Defence’s most ambitious – and unusual – attempt to bring hi-tech science to the frontline. Called the Grand Challenge, the £4m project calls on engineers to design a robot that can scour an urban area for enemy combatants and explosives and report back, preferably without human intervention …”

Read full article at www.guardian.co.uk

From The Guardian, Friday May 2 2008