Can you move those boxes over there?

“Can you move those boxes over there?”. A simple instruction for a human worker in a workshop or a warehouse but not so easy for a robot.

We already have thousands of worker robots in our factories, warehouses, nuclear power facilities and seas. We also have an increasing number of service robots in our shops, banks and airports. But these robots run in very controlled environments or are remote controlled and what we are facing now is a new wave of general-purpose humanoid robots that will replace human workers.

If the UK is going to design and manufacture these humanoid robots there’s a lot of catching up to do. It’s more likely that we will buy the ones that have already been developed in China and the US. But there’s work to be done before we can let them loose.

If we deconstruct the instruction to move a pile of boxes. First the robot has to convert the speech into text and run it through it’s processing to understand what the instruction means. Assuming that it works out that it’s supposed to pick up one of those square brown things and carry it to somewhere else then it has to understand what “over there” means. It’s the simplest thing for a human to know that the pointed finger or slight tilt of the head of the person instructing them means the shelves in the back left corner of the room, but not so easy for a robot.

Do we want the robot to speak back to us if it doesn’t understand our question or is there some other way we would like to communicate with it? If it speaks then do we want it to sound like it is acting out a scene in a Shakespeare play (as all the supermarket ones do) or would we like it to sound more like our own speaking voice? Or even use a clone of our own speaking voice? Do we want it to notice when we are looking tired or stressed or are we worried that it has a camera running all the time and is continuously watching us?

The UK is well placed to become a leading authority on Human Robot Interaction (HRI), working on the software, sensing and integration side to implement humanoids in a way that is acceptable and useful to people. There are over 25 HRI labs at universities and research centres in the UK so we have a head start in this field. How about if those people in the labs who truly understand the HRI challenge link up with some of the business schools that are keen to commercialise the new excitement about robotics?

At Ohbot we are trying to encourage the first steps in HRI by putting a simple physical robot head in front of children and learners aged 8 and up so that they can see how easy it is to write simple code that makes their robot move and speak to them in the way that they want it to. The moment a child makes an Ohbot move for the first time is still a magical thing to see and we hope that in the 10 years since we started, we have inspired some to go from there into a career in technology.

Increasingly we are seeing the adoption of Ohbot by research institutes as a low-cost platform for HRI research. The 8,000 Ohbots that we have manufactured over the last 10 years have all been made in our workshop in Gloucestershire and we’re always on hand to give advice and support.

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