News Story

Taking AI out of the Lab: Real-world data collection at The Saxon Clinic

Tuesday 23 Jun 2026

Building on the momentum of the Innovate UK–funded initiative at KMi to reimagine hospital efficiency, the project has reached an exciting new milestone. Under the guidance of Prof Enrico Motta, our autonomous robot stepped beyond the confines of the laboratory and into the living, breathing environment of The Saxon Clinic, embarking on an intensive real-world data collection mission.

Creating cognitive robots for healthcare is not simply a technical challenge, it demands immersion in the complexity and rhythm of real clinical spaces. As the robot navigated bustling corridors and treatment rooms, it captured a rich and diverse dataset of medical equipment, everyday clinical objects, and spatial layouts. This growing repository of visual intelligence now fuels the next phase of innovation, powering deep learning models designed to interpret and respond to complex healthcare environments. The newly gathered images are being integrated into large-scale object detection pipelines capable of recognising over 100 distinct objects, from critical medical supplies to potential safety hazards. These advances feed into hybrid AI architectures that combine visual perception with common-sense reasoning, bringing us closer to robots that can move safely and intelligently through dynamic hospital settings.

Such progress is made possible through strong collaboration. This field mission brought together Krishna Pavani Munta, Research Assistant in Cognitive Robotics at KMi; Kelvin Benny, AI Engineer at Swift Robotics; and Ilyass Trann, AI Intern at The Open University. We are also deeply grateful to the staff at The Saxon Clinic, whose support and expertise were instrumental in helping us understand and map the operational environment.

This international effort, part of the Eureka framework’s “Resilient Enterprise” initiative, includes collaborators from Finland, Switzerland, South Korea, and the UK. The OU’s role focuses on healthcare robotics, leveraging long-standing partnerships, including one with Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre.

Finally, this project also contributes to the MK:Smart initiative, a research programme launched in 2014, which fosters innovation and the smart city agenda in Milton Keynes.