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Robots: Our plastic pals who are fun to be with?

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Robots

Nick Hampshire ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 10 Nov 2005 10:30 GMT

...does not recognise that we need to keep making things. People need to see high technology as being of great value to the country. The stock market needs to stop taking a short-term view to investment in manufacturing and the media needs to give a more positive perception of technology," he argues.

No political commitment in the UK
However, despite this pessimism, there is some excellent leading-edge research being undertaken in the UK, as well as across Europe. This work is now beginning to be backed up by a growing political commitment, underlined in the recent statements by the EU's director of emerging technologies, Ulf Dahlsten. The governments and private companies should boost robotics by commissioning new products that will help drive the robotics industry forward, he states.

Already the European Commission has said that it will be helping companies such as EADS, BAE Systems and Philips coordinate robotics research. Another example of the EU's political commitment was the October 2005 launch of The European Technology Platform in Robotics (EUROP). EUROP will aim to bring together all the main European industrial and academic robotics stakeholders and public authorities, to develop a common robotics technology platform.

R.U.Robots' Pegman believes that, "EUROP is essential to consolidate European R&D strategy in robotics. It is a requisite for preparing a new generation of robots that would closely collaborate with workers and move out of the factory to conquer a new wave of novel service, security and space application markets".

New generation of robots
The proponents of EUROP, such as Pegman, are promoting a vision of empowering European citizens by using robots that work with rather than away from people and robots that interact — with people, with each other and evolve, learn and adapt their behaviour to their environment and the requirements of the task they are given.

"The growing spread of ubiquitous computing and communication environments will lead to robot technologies becoming the agents of physical action, although it must be emphasised that the functioning of such robots will not be predicated upon the existence of any network," says Rich Walker of UK robotics company Shadow Robots. "Robots will increasingly occupy the same ergonomic space as humans. Moving around, sensing, understanding and acting will become increasingly important as a way of delivering, individually or collectively as a group, novel capabilities, applications and services," he explains.

The aim of the EUROP platform is to unite all the main industrial and academic robotics stakeholders and public authorities around this common vision — where research goals and priorities of industrial relevance, timeframes and action plans on a number of strategically important issues can be agreed upon and relevant actions implemented. Doing so will move the focus of European robotics away from being a purely technological one, towards an application-based focus.