A few weeks ago, I was part of a double act running the robotics activity at the Technology in Action Residential School in Bath.

The activity is based on a "robot rescue" mission, with several small student teams learning how to program and control a small Lego robot as it explores a tunnel network in search of a lost teddy with an emergency light beacon!

The activity was originally inspired by the RoboCup Robot Rescue Challenge, an annual, international event that sets teams of robot researchers the challenge of building a robot to explore a simulated disaster area.

This year, the competition was held in Atlanta, and whilst we didn't enter a robot into the Senior League, some colleagues of mine from the OU Robotics Outreach Group were there as officials at RoboCupJunior.

RoboCupJunior is a schools competition run in the Spring Term of each year that sees school teams competing in one of three areas - robot football, robot rescue and robot dance.

Robot football and robot reescue are both derived from the senior challenges, but robot dance is a far more creative affair. The statement of the challenge is simple: "design, build and program a robot to entertain the judges by dancing to a song of your choice two minutes".

Although the competition is won or lost by the performance of the robots, many teams choose to dance along with their robot and to great effect. This year's international champions - for the second year in a row - was a team of eight twelve to fifteen year olds from Amberfield School in Essex. This year's entry - Swan Song  - developed a visual theme that brought the first prize home with them last year as Flight of the Phantom Phoenixes.

I'm not sure if we'd get away with Robot Dance in Technology in Action, although several of our groups this year did attempt a synchronised robot ballet!

PS Quentin Cooper from the Material World joined my colleague Jon Rosewell at the Technology in Action Robotics Summer School this year. You can find out whether Ted was successfully rescued by tuning in to The Material World, BBC Radio 4 between 16.30 and 17.00 on Thursday August 9th 2007. Or listen again after the initial broadcast from The Material World website.

About the author

Tony Hirst is co-founder of the OU Robotics Outreach Group and a lecturer in artificial intelligence at the Open University. Far too much of his time is spent playing with web technologies, developing tools and applications that he claims will be OUseful, one day...

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In a horizon scanning report published by the Department for Trade and Industry in late 2006, the compilers of a section entitled "Robot-Rights: Utopian dream or rise of the machine?" suggested that: "As computers and robots become increasingly important to humans and over time become more and more sophisticated, calls for certain rights to be extended to robots could be made."

This very issue - should robots have rights? - opened proceedings at a Walking With Robots (WWR) dialogue event at the Dana Centre yesterday evening. The question is an emotive one, but not one we need to be asking just yet: the days when we share our homes with humanoid robots demanding equal rights and a room of their own are still very much in the realm of science fiction. But that's not to say to say we shouldn't be thinking about the consequences of integrating robots into our everyday lives right now. Or asking questions about the extent to which we want to develop autonomous (self-controlled, rather than remotely controlled) robots for our homes, factories and even battlefields.

Several members of the UK robotics research community's Walking With Robots network, myself included, were invited along to the Dana Centre to discuss these and related issues, first as panel members grilled by Professor Noel Sharkey, and then with several separate audience groups. If you've ever been to a Cafe Scientifique, you can probably imagine the scene. If not, I urge you to pop along to one. They are typically informal evening affairs in comfortable surroundings - arts centre cafes are my favourite - with a short spiel by a local scientist followed by audience led discussion.

Last night's starter began with a statement of the panel members' personal long term hopes and short term fears for robotics, followed by a series of smaller group discussions. These provided the opportunity for everyone to explore in a more intimate setting the practical state of robotics today and the researcher's views of the likely future of robotics advances, as well tackling issues such as the possibility of a robot takeover (low) and the consequences of building a conscious robot (depends what you mean by conscious!).

My personal concern for the short term is not necessarily about the threats robots pose to us today but the claims that are made by the media - and more often than not, by Hollywood - about robot capabilities. My own research field - Artificial Intelligence - still suffers today from the way it was oversold in the 1970s as being the chase for human level machine intelligence. Like intellectual fairy gold, which can't be hoarded but can only be spent before midnight on the day it has been acquired, both artificial intelligence and robots suffer the similar fate of becoming not real AI, or not a real robot, as soon as they leave the lab and become a commercial technology.

Partly for this reason, the future view dominates the way robots are represented. Think of a home help robot, and you probably imagine a robot butler or robot maid cooking the tea and doing the dishes. Not a microwave cooking a machine packed ready meal and a dishwasher, washing machine and robot vacuum cleaner (available from all good electrical retailers now!) handling the other domestic chores.

The reality of robots today is a combination of very sophisticated - yet often very dumb - minimally autonomous machines with limited power supplies and a degree of intelligence that is remarkable when compared to a thermostat, but often limited to allowing the robot to perform well on only a single, very well defined task. Common sense machine intelligence - like general purpose humanoid robots - is still a far off dream (although sometimes it may not seem that way, like when using a web search engine, for example!).

As far as my long term vision for robotics goes, Amara's Law does it for me, harking back as it does to the dangers of over-promising what a technology will deliver in the short term, whilst completely failing to predict how the technologies will actually revolutionise our lives: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run".

About the author

Tony Hirst is co-founder of the OU Robotics Outreach Group and a lecturer in artificial intelligence at the Open University. Far too much of his time is spent playing with web technologies, developing tools and applications that he claims will be OUseful, one day...

Subscribe to Tony Hirst's posts