We are the robots...

25/02/2009

In the 1960s we were promised robots would be the future... so where are they?

By Jasper Hamill
When ASIMO, the world’s most advanced humanoid robot arrives in Edinburgh next month, scifi nerds are bound to be a little disappointed. Unlike C3P0, it can’t speak six million languages – in fact, it can barely speak one. Unlike The Terminator, it can’t shoot shotguns while riding motorcycles and, in stark contrast to Johnny 5, ASIMO’s nowhere near alive.

Hollywood’s given us a false impression of what robots should be able to do, according to Sethu Vijayakumar, a robotics expert from Edinburgh University. “Expectations are much higher of the robotics field due to science fiction. You cannot wow people. I’ve shown my four-year-old daughter something we spent four years working on and she said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve seen that in the cartoons’. She wasn’t impressed.”
The word robot essentially means “something that can serve the human”, says Vijayakumar, a definition that has grown to encompass machines on car production lines as well as more advanced contraptions like ASIMO, which can walk, run and even recognise people’s faces.

Throughout history, there have been attempts to build labour-saving machines, and humans have imagined the creation of artificial replicas of themselves since the Greek tale of Pygmalion, a story about a sculptor that falls in love with his statue and pines for it until Aphrodite takes pity, breathing life into her. But it was in the 20th century that humanity’s imagination ran riot, as the pace of actual technology struggled to keep up.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, author Isaac Asomiv first used the word robotics in his story ‘Liar!’, which also introduced the first of his famous three laws: that robots must not harm human beings (the other two are that a robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law, and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law). The sophisticated machines he described were able to take the places of nurses and nannies but in the real world, only very simple machines had been built. 
It wasn’t until 1961 that the first industrial robot started to work for humans, when Unimate started performing dangerous welding operations. Industrial processes had been performed by machines before, so why was Unimate considered so revolutionary? Vijayakumar explains: “This was a first for robotics because for car-welding, a machine required anthropomorphic skills which, in this case, mimicked the human arm. This made it substantially different from, say, a machine used to wrap biscuits.”

After this success, robotics scientists rushed to create machines that could perform other tasks – the holy grail being the creation of a fully autonomous robot that can perceive the world around it, act independently and wander around freely, without a plug cord tethering it to one place. 
The military have invested heavily in the design of such a device, with the hope that they can fight wars from afar or rescue injured soldiers. 

Robotics technology is already in use on the battlefield, in the form of bomb-defusal robots or the Predator drone (an unmanned recon plane), but these all require a connection to a human operator. Clearly there are ethical dilemmas in the effort to design a robo-soldier, as any malfunction in a heavily armed machine could lead to many civilian deaths.

Luckily, this level of technology is some way off and with it the nightmare situation of robots gone wild, popularised by Terminator. At the moment, the most autonomous robot we have is ASIMO, which stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility and is altogether too cute to be sent out to kill. It’s been 20 years in the making and takes the revolutionary step of incorporating many different systems, just like a living organism. It can walk like a human – something that is profoundly difficult to achieve – respond to its own name and can even work out when someone is waving at it.

Despite Vijayakumar’s pessimism, visitors to the Edinburgh Science Festival will surely be wowed by what it can do, though they’ll probably also be depressed by what it – or any other robot – can’t do. Real robo-fanciers, on the other hand, are patient people and know that while the future is bright for robotics, it’s also distant. 

Edinburgh Science Festival, April 4-18
www.sciencefestival.co.uk