Dyson, the engineering company best known for its bagless vacuum cleaners, is to invest £5m in a Robotics Vision lab at Imperial College, London.
The research will focus on vision systems that can help robots understand and adapt to the world around them, the company said.
Below is a video of one of their projects SLAM++.
Dyson has been working on robotics with Imperial's Prof Andrew Davison since 2005, and he will run the new lab.
The research will cover domestic robots as well as his speciality, robotic vacuum cleaners.
James Dyson said: "My generation believed the world would be overrun by robots by the year 2014. We now have the mechanical and electronic capabilities, but robots still lack understanding - seeing and thinking in the way we do.
"Mastering this will make our lives easier and lead to previously unthinkable technologies."
Although the UK may believe it's a pioneer in this field, a number of other small robotic vacuum cleaners, such as LG's Hom-Bot and iRobot's Roomba, have come on to the market and are achieving great success.
iRobot also has a long-standing history with AI robotics for the military and enforcement authorities.
The five-year investment, supplemented by an additional £3m of match-funding from other sources, will pay for 15 scientists, including some of Dyson's own engineers, the company said.
Prof Davison, currently head of robot vision at Imperial's department of computing, is a collaborative team member for the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM++) systems. (see the video above).
The innovative group's work on SLAM++ is led by Renato Salas-Moreno.
Davison says: "A truly intelligent domestic robot needs to complete complex everyday tasks while adapting to a constantly changing environment.
"We will research and develop systems that allow machines to both understand and perceive their surroundings - using vision to achieve it."
UK engineering and robotic innovative projects are still bogged down in wrangles over meagre budgets, nepotism, cronyism, administrative hurdles and stifling red tape, resulting in mediocre products that are a mere shadow imprint of their original concepts.
Academic institutes fight each other over the financial scraps thrown to them by a UK government focussed only on boosting the enormous profits of the financial institutes to which they are connected.
Let's wish this project one more success, given that it is fronted my a real live English Lord. Who else would be allowed to rise above their station and receive the meagre financial backing of an elitist government in a democratically failing UK.
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