The MoD has announced two new SBRI competitions that are now open. Also open now is a new competition from the DfT and the Highways Agency on using synthetic environments in transport.

The first of the MoD competitions is looking for innovative research on Prosthetics. The MoD has a high obligation for duty of care to help retain personnel in-service and minimise disability on discharge. This call focuses on two specific areas of treatment research related to amputation and similar complex traumas. The first is the physiological and repair process and the second is functional restoration and retraining.

The second MoD competition is in the field of Automatic Imagery Extraction. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance imagery systems generate huge volumes of data, ranging from high resolution digital images to full motion video and require a large amount of operator effort to fully analyse and exploit. The competition seeks automatic and semi-autonomous tools and techniques to ease the operator workload in processing and exploiting imagery data. New tools and techniques should address the full range of activities including image registration, cueing of targets of interest, feature extraction, recognition and identification of targets, archiving and retrieval of products.

These two competitions are open to all companies and are specifically suited to those that are not currently engaged with the MoD. The Centre of Defence Enterprise is the gateway to the Ministry of Defence for UK innovators, academia and industry and SBRI competitions are a way of providing a rapid response to help ensure that our Armed Forces are best equipped now and in the future. These subjects cover a wide range of topics and will be of interest to a large spectrum of SMEs, academia and industries. Interested companies should register on the MoD science website.

The Department for Transport and the Highways Agency are running a third SBRI competition to explore the use of synthetic environments applied to transport, in this case, modelling and managing complex traffic situations on motorways. DfT and HA are seeking to test new modelling and visualisation techniques that can be applied and used to understand how human behaviour and the physical infrastructure interact, so that better decisions can be made in the management of the road network. There is a large amount of data available to create synthetic models and this will be made available to potential companies. This competition is open to all companies, including those not currently engaged in the transport sector. There are two stages to the process - registration and application. Interested companies should register on the SBRI competition website.

All SBRI competitions are listed on a new section of the Technology Strategy Board website.