Conference Programme 2026

Competition to bring increasingly capable vehicles to market has never been more intense. Development times are reducing, vehicle complexity is increasing and global market pressures demand that engineering teams make the right decisions earlier than ever. At Lotus Engineering, advanced simulation and objective development methods are combined with decades of vehicle dynamics experience to establish the fundamental character and capability of a vehicle long before the final stages of physical development.

But what happens when the simulation says the car is good? This presentation explores the critical relationship between objective engineering and expert subjective assessment: when the driver enters the development process, what an expert vehicle assessor is actually evaluating, and how subjective observations are translated back into engineering parameters and physical changes. Using the Lotus approach to vehicle dynamics development, John will explore why this human-in-the-loop development remains essential in extracting the last 5% — transforming a technically capable vehicle into one that communicates with its driver, inspires confidence and, ultimately, is engineered For the Drivers.

As process nodes shrink and modern architectures grow exponentially complex, semiconductor design has reached a critical tipping point. The surging demand for advanced CPUs, GPUs, and AI accelerators requires a fundamental shift in how chips, packages, and entire systems are engineered. In this insightful fireside chat, Neil Tyler sits down with Madhuparna Datta to explore how more than two decades of EDA evolution have paved the way for the next major leap in semiconductor innovation.

Modern embedded systems depend on hardware, firmware and software working together as one system. Yet these disciplines are often developed using different processes, tools, terminology and lifecycle timescales. The resulting gaps can create unclear ownership, incompatible interfaces, configuration mismatches and costly integration problems that appear late in development.

This talk will present practical ways to bridge the systems-software interface from early architecture through integration and verification. Using an embedded-system example, it will show how teams can align system intent, make informed hardware-software allocation decisions, define and manage critical interfaces, maintain configuration consistency and test incrementally. Attendees will leave with practical questions and techniques they can apply to identify interface risks earlier and improve engineering delivery.

From five-time World Championship-winning Team Principal to leading Lola Cars’ return to elite motorsport, Mark Preston has built a career at the intersection of raw performance, cutting-edge engineering, and fast-paced decision-making. In this fireside chat, Mark explores how Lola is leveraging the latest artificial intelligence capabilities, advanced driver-in-the-loop simulation, and sustainable materials to accelerate its next-generation electric (Formula E) and hydrogen racing programs.

If you have the good fortune of always passing EMC emissions testing first time, then read no further. If, however, you have experienced an EMC failure that has led to a difficult redesign or a lengthy investigation, this talk is for you.

Circuit diagrams describe the intended electrical behaviour of a product, but only within a range of operating conditions. The components we use are not ideal, and at higher frequencies their parasitic elements can significantly change the way currents flow. These effects can be measured and incorporated into circuit simulations—but how do we account for the physical structures, interconnections and unintended paths within the product itself? And how can we assess the likely EMC performance before reaching the test laboratory?

This talk explores the often surprising coupling and decoupling paths through which high-frequency energy can travel. It will demonstrate how seemingly insignificant components, connections and physical structures can create unexpected current paths, and how these can contribute to EMC emissions.

The aim is to provide practical insight that will help you identify potential EMC problems earlier, understand their causes, and make more informed EMC risk assessments during the design process.

Engineering is more human-centric than most people realise, and that’s precisely where AI falls down.

Skip the tool demos and let’s tackle the real question; what happens to engineers over the next five to ten years?

Join Dunstan Power as he examines where AI genuinely helps, where it fails with total confidence, and who really benefits when "efficiency" means job losses.

Expect straight talking on the "boomer" optimists and "gloomer" doom-mongers, and where reality actually sits. 

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for their own engineering teams, clarity on which skills matter most, and a confident answer to why engineers still matter.

Artificial intelligence is transforming product development faster than any technology since the introduction of 3D CAD. In just a few years, AI has evolved from answering engineering questions to writing code, generating CAD models, and assisting engineers throughout the design process. But despite the excitement surrounding text-to-CAD, creating geometry is only the first step. Engineering has never been about geometry alone - it is about capturing, understanding, and evolving engineering intent.

This session explores the next generation of AI-driven engineering, where intelligent agents move beyond creating shapes to understanding design intent, manufacturing requirements, simulation results, company standards, and product data. We'll separate hype from reality, examine where AI is delivering measurable value today, and discuss why the future belongs to AI that works within the engineering process - not around it.

Attendees will gain a practical understanding of the technologies driving this transformation, including large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), engineering agents, code generation, and model-aware AI. We'll explore why editable, parametric models remain the foundation of engineering, how AI is becoming a collaborative engineering partner rather than a replacement for designers, and why engineering context is rapidly becoming AI's greatest competitive advantage.

Finally, we'll look ahead to a future where AI doesn't simply generate CAD, rather it creates reusable engineering knowledge, automates complex design tasks, learns from existing products, and accelerates innovation while keeping engineers firmly in control. As AI becomes embedded within cloud-native engineering platforms, organizations will unlock new levels of productivity, collaboration, traceability, and design intelligence that standalone AI tools simply cannot achieve.

Whether you're evaluating today's AI tools or building a long-term digital engineering strategy, you'll leave with a practical framework for understanding where AI creates value today, where it's headed next, and why the future of engineering isn't text-to-product - it's AI accelerating engineers within the engineering system of record.

Attendee Takeaways

• Understand the evolution from text-to-CAD to AI-driven engineering.
• Learn where today's AI delivers real engineering value - and where it falls short.
• Discover how engineering agents, code generation, and model-aware AI are reshaping product development.
• Understand why engineering intent, editable parametric models, and product context are essential for trustworthy AI.
• See why cloud-native engineering platforms are enabling the next generation of AI-powered product development.

Science fiction has long imagined machines that feel: aircraft that sense the air flowing over their wings, vehicles aware of every load they carry, structures that report damage before it becomes failure. Engineering reality has lagged behind, relying on a handful of discrete sensors wired into structures that are otherwise blind. Hyve Dynamics is closing that gap with an ultra-thin, flexible sensing skin that bonds directly to a surface. It measures pressure, suction, temperature and strain across the whole area in real time, and it is designed as a platform onto which further sensing modalities can be integrated. In effect, it is a nervous system for machines, and the first layer of truly adaptronic structures.

This talk goes under the skin. Juan Sebastian Conde, Co-Founder and chief scientist, will show how a single conformable skin can replace hundreds of drilled pressure taps and discrete sensors. It can be installed in hours rather than weeks, without modifying the structure, and it captures a complete picture of what the surface experiences rather than a handful of points. He will outline the electronics that turn that surface into a live data stream. He will then explore applications across aerospace, motorsport, wind energy, robotics and composite structures, from faster wind-tunnel and flight testing to real-time structural health monitoring, damage detection and digital twins fed by live data. The session closes with a look ahead to machines and structures that don't just sense their environment but respond and adapt to it.

Offshore wind is set to become the backbone of Europe's clean energy system, requiring the deployment of thousands of turbines and thousands of kilometres of supporting electrical infrastructure. This unprecedented investment presents a significant opportunity for UK engineering and manufacturing businesses, with UK offshore wind supply chain markets targeted by the UK Offshore Wind Industrial Growth Plan (IGP) expected to be worth £92 billion annually by 2040.

This session will explore the priority areas identified as growth opportunities by UK Government and industry through the IGP, highlighting where support and investment are being targeted across the offshore wind sector. Attendees will gain insight into the guidance, programmes, and resources available to help UK engineering firms position themselves within these strategically important markets. The talk will also examine the technical and commercial realities of developing products for offshore wind applications. From designing large-scale structures and electrical systems capable of operating reliably for decades in some of the world's harshest environments, to understanding how engineering decisions influence customer value, project costs, and competitiveness, success requires much more than technical excellence alone.

Modern engineering systems increasingly face failure modes driven by stochastic physical phenomena that are difficult to detect using conventional signal processing techniques. DC arc faults are a representative example, as their highly variable behaviour, dependence on operating conditions, and transient nature make reliable detection extremely challenging. To address this challenge, we developed a data-driven fault detection framework based on an extensive experimental dataset and machine learning-assisted parameter optimisation, enabling robust identification of arc-fault signatures under realistic operating conditions.

Great designs rarely fail because the engineering was wrong. More often, reality gets in the way: components become obsolete, costs rise, suppliers change, requirements evolve, and budgets get tighter.

This talk explores what happens when a design moves from the drawing board into the real world — and how engineers can design, adapt and redesign for the challenges that inevitably follow.

From making the right choices at the start of a product’s life to dealing with obsolescence years later, we’ll look at the trade-offs between performance, cost, availability, reliability and longevity. Through practical examples and lessons learned, the talk will explore how constraints can drive better engineering decisions, and how a thoughtful approach to lifecycle design can reduce the cost and disruption of change.

For most of the space age, spacecraft have been designed around a simple assumption: everything must be manufactured, assembled and tested on Earth before surviving launch as a complete system. Emerging capabilities in robotic servicing, in-space assembly and in-space manufacturing are beginning to challenge that assumption, creating new possibilities for how spacecraft and large structures are designed, built and operated.

This presentation will explore three areas where engineering design is beginning to move beyond the constraints of launch. First, how designing spacecraft for in-space servicing could enable repair, upgrade and life extension; second, how designing specifically for robotic assembly could enable structures larger and more adaptable than can be launched conventionally; and finally, how manufacturing directly in space could exploit the space environment and ultimately remove some launch constraints altogether. Drawing on current developments and practical engineering challenges, the talk will consider what engineers need to do differently when launch is no longer the end of the manufacturing process.