Hands-on inventor uses technology to take on danger in the workplace

“In the early days we were just a group of guys making robotic hands in a shed,” Walker says. “We made no money, I had no day job but we had a spirit to create.”

With initial funding from the DTI they built a website and started selling the arms to research departments at UK universities. Now the majority of their revenues come from exporting to overseas colleges and R&D teams.

The market place is still at an R&D stage, testing how these arms can be used and developing robotic, cognitive intelligence. “It’s all basic cognitive science at the moment but could revolutionise manufacturing,” Walker says. “Replacing humans in repetitive lifting, picking something up, putting it down and so on. These machines can understand how to hold gently with just their finger tips or grip when needed.”

Research shows that using robotics in manufacturing at the same level as our most advanced competitors, such as Germany, would increase productivity by 22pc and jobs by 7pc, he claims. “It would just help with the mind-numbingly repetitive and the dangerous.”

China, Thailand and Vietnam are some of the biggest buyers in the manufacturing industry but there is a new need in the UK, according to Walker — decommissioning nuclear plants and oil rigs.

“The decommissioning of nuclear in the UK could cost the tax payer between £60bn and £100bn using today’s level of technology but using robots could reduce this bill and make the process cheaper, quicker and safer. And once we’ve completed it we have a new UK capability to sell abroad. We’d be turning liabilities into assets,” he says.

According to Walker, there is a premium paid for the reputation of British advanced engineering and technology, part of the heritage of Rolls-Royce and ARM.

Walker is one of the “brains” on the Government’s sector steering committee, which on Tuesday launched a national strategy to help Britain take on Japan and Korea for a share of $6.4 trillion global industry.

“Robotics have been very fragmented with lots of different universities and corporate research arms doing bits of robotics but no, one coherent voice,” he says. Until now.

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