How close are we to the age of the robot?

We’ve long had a fascination with robots or droids taking over human tasks. But how close are we to the age of the robot, asks Áilín Quinlan.

Imagine a future where your fridge runs your household – if not your life!

Not so crazy as it sounds, if you’re to believe Nick Campbell, Stokes Professor of Speech and Communication Technology at Trinity College.

How close are we to having robots in our day-to-day lives?

They’re already all around us he says – even if they don’t sport humanoid-style arms and legs!

And with every week that passes, they’re becoming more and more sophisticated.

“They are intelligent devices – your smartphone is about as close to a robot as you can get, if you think of a robot as a device which is sensitive and has activation,” he points out.

“It’s a very intelligent device which is connected to the internet and is voice activated – you can talk to it.

“It knows where you are and may even know where you’re headed. Just because it doesn’t have arms and legs doesn’t mean it’s not a robot!

“If you stand up or sit down your phone will know it if it’s in your pocket - it has motion sensors and it can have emotion sensors which will react to a change in your tone of voice.”

Think of the Google car which can drive around without requiring a human to sit at the controls, he points out.

“We’ve had automatic - driverless - trains for many years, and we now have the capacity to make driverless cars. The technology is there, we just need to sort out the legalities.”

Currently we’re headed towards developing super-sophisticated machines that understand us and the way we live, he says.

In just a few short years, suggests Campbell, the central intelligence unit for most households may well be located in one of our humblest domestic appliances:

“In four or five years, the fridge may be the centre of intelligence in the house.

“There could be an interface in the house which you’ll probably be able to talk to and which could give you information. It’ll be like the house controller!”

“If I was designing a robot for a house it wouldn’t be something that would run around, it would be something that’d be constantly there.

“If I was putting a controller or sensor or control panel into a house, I’d put it in the fridge because the fridge is always switched on!”

“It would tell you that you have run out of milk and when to get fresh chicken,” he observes, adding however, that the role of such sophisticated technology would not be restricted to reminding house-owners about the need for grocery top-ups, but could actually be programmed to alert the inhabitants to potential problems. The house intelligence system can learn what’s normal and what’s not from the behaviour patterns of the building’s inhabitants, he explains.

Once programmed to monitor normal behaviour and routines in the house, it would be capable of raising the alert if this pattern was disrupted.

In other words, explains Campbell, “it would know about you.”

“Currently we have smart computers which can say the house is safe and everything is normal.”

Smart devices can turn the lights on, check what’s in the fridge and, if an older person is in the bath, they can, for example, check that the water is still warm through temperature sensors.

Therefore, if it’s normal to have milk in the fridge and to have someone in the bath when the water is hot, an alert can be sounded by the household intelligence system if there’s no milk in the fridge and someone remains in the bath once the water has cooled.

“It’s very exciting to see what can be done,” adds Campbell, the creator of Herme, the Talking Robot, which was developed at the Speech Communication Laboratory at Trinity College, and is capable of carrying on a conversation with humans for about three minutes.

“We’re already making sensors that learn normal behaviour and will respond - my car’s wiper will come on automatically if it starts to rain.

“If I drive through a tunnel, the lights will come on automatically.”

And there are other uses – Japanese society is already familiar with the concept of companion robots for elderly people, those who live alone, or are sick.

“In Japan they have these cuddly furry things that wag their tails if you are sad and you can stroke them and they are or may shortly be, voice activated.

“They look a bit like a porpoise or a sea lion. A dog is a wonderful partner but there are very few hospitals that have dogs in them,” he points out.

For Dr Dan Toal, Head of the Mobile and Marine Robotics Research Centre at University of Limerick, robots are particularly valuable in search and rescue, in the area of offshore submarine robotics or offshore marine salvage - that is, in situations where sending in human divers is hazardous. However, he says, eventually robots will be able to operate in human-shared environments.

“Look at aircraft – even though there are still pilots in airplanes, these are almost fully automated now,” he says. “The aim eventually will be to have robots which are able to operate in human-shared environments, for example a robot car driving in the city.”

However, as he points out, solving the technological issues is only one side of the coin - there is also the issue of trust and of certification.

“In the air industry you could technically have a fully automated passenger aircraft but you will not get it certified.”

Currently, he points out, all the sub-sea and offshore oil and gas and renewable energy work is carried out by robots with humans in the loop.

“If you want a robot to construct or repair a wave energy device it has to be one which you operate in a very challenge marine conditions with strong waves.

“These are all things that will affect society in the longer-term - if we don’t solve such issues marine renewable energy development will be constrained.”

There’s been a very significant area of uptake of unmanned airborne systems (drones) in a wide range of applications such as monitoring land-banks or large swathes of forest he says.

They’re also now being used to deliver much needed medical equipment, or even to courier commercial packages (there have been reports that Amazon in the US now considering using unmanned airborne system to deliver packages to shoppers).

“There’s now a Dutch company which delivers a defibrillator to a 999 distress call via an unmanned airborne system - with a radio link so that an expert can oversee the correct placing of the pads on the patient’s body, operate the defibrillator and monitor the patient’s heart response while paramedics are en route!”.