Instant Genius - What makes a robot a robot? – Dr Lucy Rogers

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

This week we speak to Dr Lucy Rogers, who casts aside any Hollywood depictions of skull-crushing Terminators, and look at the real-life robots that are making a positive impact in our lives. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit nameadio.com to learn more. just had surgery and then they speak to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, you've got to do this and you've got to take these medicines at this time. And the patient will often say, okay, yeah, yeah, I've got all that, but maybe hasn't. But if they're actually talking to a chatbot, so basically just a robot, they're actually more likely to ask questions and get them to repeat.

So how many pills was that? Because they're not taking up the doctor's valuable time. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine, team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, the production editor at BBC Focus magazine. This week we cast aside any Hollywood depictions of skull-crushing terminators trying to overthrow humanity and instead we look at the real-life robots that are making a positive impact in our lives.

Whether it's piecing together cars in a factory or performing intricate surgery in theatre, robots have given us the ability to perform tasks our human hands could never dream of doing. To guide us through the weird world of automaton's and androids, we're talking to Dr Lucy Rogers, an engineer and fellow of the institution of mechanical engineers. As a maker, she knows a thing or two about building these mechanised marbles

and as a judge on the recent BBC series of robot wars, she's well versed in smashing them to pieces too. She speaks to Alexander McNamara, online editor of Science Focus. I'm Dr Lucy Rogers, and I'm a mechanical engineer, a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. I'm also a maker, so I make a lot of things, and I get to play with robots. So what exactly is a robot?

Interesting that robots can mean so many things to so many different people. For the purposes of BBC Robot Wars, a robot was generally a remote-controlled vehicle that could fight. But we can have robots that can completely autonomously do things on their own. We can have robots that can answer us back. So the virtual assistance that we've got in our phones or in our homes that we speak to and ask them for the time or the travel updates, they can also be called as robots. So it's really difficult to actually define it. But it's a machine that does something with a bit of intelligence inbuilt. Okay.

So sort of like artificial intelligence in that way. Yes. But we've got robots that do stuff on manufacturing plants. that we just programmed to do one job. They're very much mechanical devices, as it were. Yes. Are there different types of robot, as you're mentioning the ones in the plants there? What different types do we have?

There's all sorts of types. We've got ones that are fluffy and can react to you, and they're being used in hospitals to like pet therapy. So you can stroke these robots, and they'll react and wag their tails or whatever, and there's one called Paro that's a big seal, and it has lovely big eyes and looks at you. There are ones that are on other planets. We've got some Mars rovers that are doing things that humans could never do up there. We can't send humans to Mars yet.

And so they're drilling and having a look at the atmosphere and what the planet is made of and actually drilling down. So we've got robots there. So we've got robots in factories. We've got robots, robot drones that are taking life belts to people who are at trouble at sea. So we've got all sorts everywhere. It's really only limited by imaginations. So it sort of suggests to me that they're doing things that we can't or maybe don't want to do. Yeah, they're taking a lot of the dull, the dangerous, the dirty work away from us. so we don't have to do it. And they're doing stuff that's, yeah, a lot of it's repetitive that we don't want to do. So, yeah, they're doing a lot of great jobs. So I'm intrigued by the fluffy power robot, though.

What's that, you know, that sounds like it's doing something completely different. Yes, that's still reacting. So if you can imagine, I suppose, it's more like a child's toy, but it's reacting very much like a pet. but taking a pussycat into a hospital probably isn't good for allergies and cleanliness, whereas actually this robot you can take in. So it depends on what we want. So that one is very calming.

And it's also been found, not the paro robot, but if someone has just had surgery and then they speak to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, you've got to do this and you've got to take these medicines at this time. and the patient will often say, okay, yeah, yeah, I've got all that, but maybe hasn't. But if they're actually talking to a chatbot, so basically just a robot, and it doesn't actually have to be in physical form, it could be over the phone, just a voice that they're talking to. They're actually more likely to ask questions and get them to repeat things. So how many pills was that? Because they're not taking up the doctor's valuable time.

They know they're talking to a robot. And so they also know they're not going to be judged by this robot that. saying, no, it's three pills three times a day. It wasn't four pills three times a day. It's not giving that judgmental. I told you that once. So we're sort of using robots in a, that sounds like a sort of unexpected way, how humans interact with robots to me? Yes, yes. Sometimes I'm not quite sure of some of the ethics on this because we're demanding things from some of these robots, but we're actually talking to them in our natural language. But we're missing off the pleases and thank yous.

So I'm a little bit concerned about this. I'm sure. I mean, that's one of the things. When you say it's like a voice down the phone, I would personally, if I'm talking down the phone to someone, I'd say please and thank you. And if I knew it would a robot, would I or would I not? Is that kind of a reason why we make robots sometimes look a bit like humans?

It's difficult to tell. I mean, sometimes we're, we're, We were brought up with the thought of artificial intelligence really coming from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Frankenstein's monster. And so that was the first humans have created a living thing idea. And it was scary. And every horror story since has been artificial intelligence, has been something we've created and then it's gone off to do scary things. And so we've sort of got this background feeling. of all these things are quite scary. But also, humans are very good at seeing faces and things. So even if we make a robot that doesn't look like a person, we can see its face often, somehow either through sensors or it's just where it happens to have a microphone or a camera or something, we can see faces in it. And we like to make things alive. So I think that's

quite a lot of it when we want to do that. But there's some robots, for example, as they, um, ones that surgeons are using to actually do intricate surgery, where a surgeon's hand is so big. Um, if they want to do extra special delicate stuff, they're doing it in a, uh, like a booth where they're remote controlling a robot that's actually inside the person. So not, so they've opened up the person on the theatre table. And the, the, um, and the, The robot has got fine instruments, and the surgeon can actually make larger movements with their hands that scale down so that the robot makes tiny movements. So that's one of the really interesting ways that we're adapting. What we can do, and we've reached the limits of sometimes what humans can do.

we can't really I'm sure the best surgeons can move our instrument 0.1 of a mill without shaking slightly but a robot could so we can get it to do that so it's really sort of like we're using them as an extension of ourselves to sort of help with

as you say the boring things like the repetitive stuff but then also this incredible intricate detailed things as well yes yeah we're using them to our advantage, which is great. Now, I know the term robots was first used in the Carol Chappek play, Rossum's Universal Robots, and that was, I know that that was very much human-like creatures doing these repetitive workers' tasks.

Do you think that sort of started the whole thing off after Frankenstein down this sort of human-like route of robots? It could have done. I'm remembering my first real experience of robots was Isaac Asimov's science fiction series, Robots and Empire. And R. Daniel Oliver was a humanoid robot that could actually pass as human. You wouldn't know. But they, I remember really clearly reading that when I was a teenager and they made them humanoid so that you didn't have to reinvent all the tools that humans use. So we've already got, and it was the example back then when self-driving cars hadn't really been thought of, that a robot could then get in a car and drive a car, just like a human could.

Or a robot could jump down and get up into the tractor or then could use the hand tools that a human could. And so a lot of it was we're making them humanoid to do that. But the human body is so complex. We're trying to make prosthetics for people who maybe have lost a limb. And actually to redo or to make something that we take for granted like a wrist movement and actually make that robotic is really complex. And so, yeah, nature's still got some things we need to learn. So how well are we doing now as compared to, say, 10 years ago? Huge leaps and bounds.

I think it was 15 years ago that the first DARPA challenge of taking a self-driving car across a desert was run and those cars that won it I think managed to travel 200 metres and now they're going across states in the USA so yeah we've made some huge leaps with that the actual computing is amazing. I remember back in the early mid-90s trying to use a voice recognition system for some typing. I'd hurt my wrists. I needed to do some typing and I got a voice recognition system and the amount of mistakes it made. And it was very expensive. And now we've got free software online that you can talk to and it's pretty good. So yeah, huge, huge improvements in the last 10 years. and I can see another huge amount coming soon.

So going on from that, where do you see us? What robots do you see in the next 10 years? What will they be doing? There'll be a lot more of the voice recognition and actually speaking to stuff because we still, I said earlier, we are talking to our, what's the weather, tell me the weather in this place.

But we still actually have to get the wording right. We can say, turn off the lights in the living room and it might do it. it, or but turn off the lights in the lounge or turn the lights off, please, in this room might not work. And so it needs a lot more learning. And we're doing a lot of learning and also visual learning of, okay, I'm actually looking at a tree now or I'm looking at a bush and I'm looking at a dog. So the computer can actually see what it knows, will recognise what it's looking at, rather than just saying that's a lot of ones and noughts in a, and I can tell the shade

of colour. And that's, that's sort of, that to me is a sort of AI improving as well. And then the mechanic side of it, that's probably, as you say, we've got these devices that can move millimeters at a time. Can we improve on that? Probably. I'm just now thinking, for me, I'm a maker, So I like making stuff. And the things that were available 10 years ago and the things that are available to me personally now is amazing of what I could make. So I can now make myself a robot,

whereas 10 years ago it would have been a lot more expensive, a lot more difficult. What actually industry are doing as well is, again, really good. But I think some of the things we've reached limits of, we're still using a universal joint that Hook invented way back when. So some things, we have the best design already. Yeah. And it's materials.

So as a maker, what sort of robots can you make? So for someone like me, I've never done any making before. I like looking at robots and so forth, but I don't know what I could create. There's a really exciting competition called Pi Wars, where they're using a Raspberry Pi computer that's a credit card size computer that's probably got as much computing power as a desktop had 10 years ago. So it's not up to current state. You wouldn't play big games on it at the moment, but it's a good enough computer. And they're about the size of a credit card and about 30 pounds. So in the realms of affordable for a lot of people. And with that, you can attach

sensors and you can attach motors. And so you can attach motors. And so you can can program it to follow a black line, for example. So you could make it into a little buggy to have wheels. And so it could travel around. And you can program it to follow a black line or work its way through a maze. And so this Py Wars competition, it's like a decathlon or an Olympics for robots. And one of the competitions is go around an obstacle course. And you can still use your remote controlled for some of those. One of them is black line. One of them was an arcade duck shooting.

You had to make your robot be able to fire a ball at these ducks. Wooden ducks, I'll hasten to add, and see how many you could knock over. And then there was one competition where, because we don't want to fight to destruction, because people have spent a lot of time and money putting these robots together. and they're about the size that I think they fit on an A4 piece of paper, so that's sort of size. And if you put three balloons, you can attach three balloons and a pin to your robot, and you have to attack another person's robot and pop their balloons in a sort of sumo wrestle type of event. And so you're not actually going for their robot. And it doesn't matter how big or how complex their robot is.

it's the skill that either the remote control driver has got or the programming that you've already put into it. And the great thing about that competition is it doesn't matter if you're a complete beginner. You can use a box set that you've assembled yourself. So you can actually buy a robot kit and assemble it yourself and then go and enter the competition with that. Or you can make everything yourself from designing the parts and then 3D printing them or getting them laser cut. and even designing your own electronics, putting that in, making your own PCBs. It's really the differences in levels, but everyone can play on the same game. And so it's really fascinating to watch.

It sounds like it's quite a rewarding and probably, I don't know how complex it is. Is it the sort of thing that kids would be able to do? Yes, for the pie wars, there's one day that's kids only. it's schools, school teams are entering it. And I was doing the technical judging. And we had primary school kids age four and five. And then on the second day, it's families and individuals or adult teams. And yes, some of those were, I've been working in the computer industry for years,

been engineers for years. And so there was the whole mix there. And some of them were. Some of the parents were like, I have no idea what he's done, but he has done all this himself. And I'm just here to drive him. And yeah, some of the teams have been great. What sort of skills does building a robot, other than the very obvious ones, which are building mechanics and structurally things? What sort of skills can you learn by building and making your own robots?

There's a lot of logic thought that goes in trial and error and learning that failure is actually a good thing because we are so scared of failure now, particularly at schools where it's all you must pass your exams, you must do this, you must do that, we must win this football competition or whatever it is. And failure is seen as a really bad thing. But for engineering and science, failure is good because we know it's one way that didn't. work. And to actually accept that. So, oh, right. Yeah. Last time I put in these plastic screws and they broke off. So this time I'm going to put in metal screws and that'll be better. And so you've got the incremental improvements that go on after each thing that you do. And that's really to me, one of the really great things to see that they're saying, we did this and it broke. Look how well it broke. And next time we're going to make it in a thicker plastic

or we're not going to use cellar tape, we're going to use some kind of glue or welding or something else. So that they've been really good. But they've also, you can program your robots. And so learning the programming, whether it's a visual dragon drop programming, which is what I often use rather than actually the writing in Python

or C++ plus which I'm not so good at. So there's a lot of logical thought going in. So it seems that the creation of the robots is sort of, that sounds like something like kids can do and move that, but they're moving on that sort of same process of trial and error essentially.

That moved on to the sort of mega robots that we see, like the biggest ones, the smartest ones. Yes, it's exactly the same principles that a lever is a lever, no matter if you're working at something in Lego or you're making it in titanium. It's still the same sort of thing. And you know that if you push this, that will move. All the theories there. And it's just moving it up in scale and complexity.

and having more moving parts, really. The very simple robots, some of them are made out of Lego, actually, on Pi Wars. Yeah, some of them are just very simple. But some of the mechanisms that they came up with for launching the ball towards the ducks was ingenious. Someone had pneumatics working in there. Someone had elastic bands and some used Nerf gun mechanisms. So as well as the failure, one of the things I like is just the ingenuity. We don't quite, we can't go and buy something off the shelf that does this job.

What can I, what have I got that I can hack, that I can make, that I can change, that will do the job. And then this will also come out into real life. You know, you've got a problem in your house, in your car. And you think, oh, well, yeah, how can't my, I can't hold my door closed at the moment. What can I do to make that better? And so we're very much a throwaway society. And if I like, if we can reuse, repurpose or fix, make do amend. So a robot could be something as simple as to hold a door essentially that you make at home.

It could be. or we could look at, okay, my grandmother now can't open the washing machine door because she got arthritis in her hand, and we could maybe make an adaption for that. I think probably I'm pushing the limits of what a robot is there rather than what just a mechanical adaption is, rather than saying to our little furry robot toy that we've made, go and open the washing machine door. That seems like a very advanced robot to do quite a simple thing in that case. Yes.

But going back to your humanoid thing, we can make robots that do very specific things. So the surgeon robot, you wouldn't want that trying to fix your car. That is just for doing that job. And it looks like it is just for doing that job, whereas the humanoid ones are more generic and try and do a lot more things. But it's still hard to get it to do. we want. I did a feature once which was about, oh, retro robots of like robots of the past and they were doing just very simple like retro things like being a robot butler and a robot pool cleaner

and that sort of thing. Is that, you know, we clearly haven't got any robot butlers at the moment, but is that something that we can expect in some way? Well, we've got robot vacuum cleaners and we've got robot lawnmowers, but going to a butlough, probably not. I suspect the costs involved will be a little bit prohibitive on that. You know, it's not too much of an effort to go and make a cup of tea, so I don't know if I need a whole robot to do that. Yeah, and it would just make us lazy. Yeah. On that matter of sort of like what robots can do, what's the most advanced robot that you can think of? Oh, interesting. They're very, specialised. A lot of them are very specialised. There's one called Baxter that is designed to

interact. It's in a factory, but it will work with someone. And so it'll see that you have just finished one process and then it will pass you the screws or the nuts or whatever it is for the next process. And these robots are big and they have a lot of power in them. So they could easily just knock you out by waving their arm in the wrong direction and you happen to be in the wrong place, it could knock you over. And so that safety part of actually having a robot work with a person is something that we're still working on, but something the Baxter's doing quite well. So we're not sort of at the point of like Terminator with the robots are going to hurt us that way. No, no. It's mainly accidental, which is why we're not often allowed on.

the shop floor of a factory because there are robots working and yeah, they don't know. They can't see us. They can't hear us and they won't stop. But they'll carry on doing what they were programmed to do. And I think that's the biggest thing with robots and all this artificial intelligence is we can still see, we know where the off switch is and they do what we program them to do. So far. So far.

Just while I'm thinking I've got the image of the Terminator robots in my head It brings me to the thought of fictional robots And how they're depicted As you mentioned Frankenstein earlier But A, how well do we depict robots in cinema And secondly, which is your favourite cinematic

Or TV robot Well obviously I like Matilda from Robot Wars best An Armadillo with Well, she's a real robot, surely. Well, obviously, yes. But she's also on TV. There you go. The first robot, as I said, that I really came across was our Daniel Oliver in the Asimov books.

And every robot for me now has to compare to that. So I always get a little bit disappointed. But I did love Metal Mickey when I was a kid, which will probably only appeal to a very small subset of your listeners. on this podcast. So yeah, there are some good robots out there. Tweaky from Buck Rogers was also fun. He made little noises, didn't he? Yeah.

So you say in real life, similar to obviously Matilda has crossed the boundaries of both TV and real life, but do you have other robots that you've just gone, wow, that's such an incredible and ingenious robot and what it does is just amazing? Most robots that I see I'm still drooling at, I think. It's like, oh, that's really cool. I'm glad I don't have to do that job.

There are drones that go up and inspect the pylons, and so people don't actually have to go up there anymore. But again, it's crossing that boundary of, is it a remote control machine, or has it got that bit of intelligence inside it, has it been pre-programmed already? Some of the bomb disposal robots that can go into areas and sniff out chemicals, is this a chemical area? Can we send humans in here? Are absolutely fascinating. The Boston Dynamics, all of Boston Dynamics, robot dogs, scare me to death.

I saw one recently that opened a door for another robot and let it out. They said, okay, yeah, they're getting better and better. I remember seeing my first Boston robotics ones I saw was 2011. And someone could kick it over and it got up again. And that was quite impressive then. And so in those seven years since then, they've improved a lot. So yeah, there are a lot of robots out there. The tiny, tiny ones, the ant weight or ant size, bionic ants,

They work together to move large loads. They're really impressive. What do they do? So they're based on relance and they're 3D printed and they can just collaborate together. They sort of know where each other is and can lift things. So I think there's not real much purpose in them at the moment other than they're demonstrating that this can be done.

That demonstrating the things that can be done. That makes me think there are a lot of robots out there which can seem a bit pointless and seem a bit useless. Do we make useless robots essentially just to show what can be done? It helps. I find in a lot of my making work that I'll make something that's really silly, really fun, but the underlying principles of what went into it can be put into a real live situation. And so I can catch the eye with this is a really fun.

I made some firecrackers, indoor firecrackers that were using a e-cigarette, smoke and LED lights, so it was safe. And that just caught the attention. But instead of the e-cigarette, I could have had a motor and the lights could have been some kind of other sensor. So it could have worked in a factory. the underlying programming and what I'd used could have been there. So to see something like Sophia robot, which is a artificial intelligence designed robot, she has the, I think, the head and shoulders, maybe the whole body of looking humanoid. And she's been given citizenship of Saudi Arabia.

and some of the things that she asks, I can't quite work out if they're actually pre-programmed, if she's learning or how it's working. But some of that is, one of the questions the journalist asked was, how long have I got to live? And she just turned around and said, 10 minutes. And I can't work out if that was meant to be humor or not.

So she's quite impressive, but still has a long way to go. But she's because she can tell her. jokes, you can get onto daytime TV chat shows and actually bring robots into the lives of people who probably wouldn't see them. If you don't work in a factory, if you don't work with these things, you wouldn't come across them in everyday life. And therefore, you don't know about them and you just don't start thinking about how you could use them. So is that one of the things that we need to see all different types and different kinds of robots to get that into our minds?

I think so, yes, and stop making them quite so scary, apart from maybe Sophia when she's a bit dark. Yeah. I was just thinking that I've seen Sophia and then also the Boston Dynamics robots that opened doors. There's something quite natural and human about their movements and the way they are, and I know that's this uncanny valley. Yeah. What's happening there, do you know?

In an... In a robot robotic, uncanny valley. situation. Something that's almost quite as we expect it, but not quite not enough as we expect it to be fine. I think I found a very similar thing. My first trip to the USA and it was very much like Britain, but it just wasn't. And for me, that was my uncanny valley of going to Silicon Valley actually. And seeing the yellow school buses that I'd only ever seen in The Simpsons. So it was sort of, this is very much how I'm expecting it, but actually it's not quite right, and that makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. So some of these robots that are, that is almost, I can almost interact with it in a human way. And it's not quite a robot, but it's not looking machine enough to be a machine, but it's not actually being human enough to be a human. And there's something really wrong with that. that thought of being uncomfortable makes me think about what what are we doing with robots

where we take them are there are we going down a route with some robots that that is going to make us feel uneasy about our use for them so for instance you've got things like um using robots for weaponry or using robots to um do things that other people might find a bit weird essentially yeah so i'm an engineer and i like to think is it possible can't we make it, how can we make it? And I'm really hoping that there's some ethics people keeping an eye on all our engineer types who're saying, yes, just because you can. Doesn't mean you should. Is there some sort of guiding body of the ethics of robots that they're saying when you build something, they go like, I'm not sure about that. Not saying that you're building

weapons or anything. Lases on, lasers on sharks. Yes, there are various bodies. but it's more gentleman's agreement rather than a police force of you cannot do. So, for example, I'm a fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, and if I'm doing something that's really dodgy, they will come down on me and they could take away my membership. So on a personal level and on business levels, you've got that. Companies, your shareholders, who can kick up and say, no, actually, you shouldn't be doing that.

So there are some safeguards in there. But if I had my volcano lair and my white fluffy cat, I'm not sure what could be stopping me. I assume that would be a white fluffy robotic cat. Well, obviously. Lovely. So now, I'm just thinking like robots, where can we go? Where can we find, you know, ultimately in, we've talked about the next 10 years,

but in 100 years time or whoever further than that, it's there a limit to where robots could take us essentially? I don't think so. No, I'm really excited about where they're going to be. I'm really exciting about having cars that I don't have to drive, particularly when I get to an age where I can't drive. And so I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, the robots to do jobs, I think humans are,

very creative. And actually in the last, when I started primary school, everyone had a hand-knitted jumper. And that was just one of the things that someone's nan, a granny or mother or someone in their family would have knitted them the jumper. By the time I left primary school, if you didn't have a shop-bought jumper, you were frowned upon. And so the knitting and the craft and the creativity that went into that, was sort of lost. It was sort of seen as a secondary thing. And I think particularly in a factory, a manager in a factory, is to make sure that everyone does something, does their thing,

exactly how it should be done. And you can't adapt. You can't change that without a whole load of paperwork and say, oh, it would be better if. But humans are very good at finding that would be better if. And so if we had the robots to do the dull, dangerous, dirty, mundane stuff, then I think we could actually spend a lot more human creativity time making things better for everybody. That was Dr Lucy Rogers, who provides the forward in the fabulous book, Robots, published by DK Children. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. The November issue of BBC Focus magazine is out this week, and in it we find out how spider bots could help reveal more about Neanderthal brains.

We also reveal how wolves communicate using facial expressions, explore the intriguing world of microbes in the British gut, discover how lava lamps are linked to election hacking, and find out more about the British spaceport. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

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