Autonomous systems in businesses are no longer experimental. Robots now work alongside humans in warehouses, retail stores, and hospitals, frequently deployed and supported by channel partners who never expected to become advisors on fleet operations and security inside customer networks.

This evolution is creating both opportunity and exposure. Robotics-as-a-Service and robotic deployments are becoming part of the managed service stack, yet few frameworks exist to guide customers on how they should be secured, audited, or governed. This raises new questions in the adoption process: “Should I trust it?”, “Who has access to the data?”, and “What happens when something goes wrong?”

When scale expands the attack surface

Automation within customer environments blurs the line between IT and OT (operational technology) responsibilities. Treating them as a shared domain is key to preventing blind spots.

Deploying a robot at one site is manageable for IT and OT groups to handle. Managing hundreds of thousands of robots across multiple retail or logistics locations -- that’s the challenge that customers are facing today. Each new machine deployed adds potential risk to a customer's infrastructure: misconfigured WiFi, outdated firmware, and insecure update channels all present meaningful vulnerabilities.

This is where Robotics-as-a-Service offerings can cover this gap and minimize risk. The robotic provider’s fleet management services should provide each channel partner and customer with:

• Visibility: A complete inventory of devices, software versions, and configurations.
• Integrity: The Robotics-as-a-Service offering should perform updates and end-to-end monitoring for any unauthorized access.
• Agility: Ability to monitor performance and make remote edits for operating within dynamic environments.

Each robot should be designed to operate fully autonomously without requiring broad or sensitive access to customer networks, and should maintain strict security boundaries. This ensures the robot does not introduce new risks for IT and OT teams.

Data governance in motion

Robots challenge traditional data governance programs because of the sheer diversity of information they collect while operating in public and dynamic spaces. A single robot may generate events, points of interest, telemetry, imagery, and mapping data — each with different formats, storage needs, retention profiles, and compliance considerations. Data is often distributed across multiple locations, aggregated at different layers, and subject to handling rules that depend on the specific sensor or subsystem producing it.

For channel partners and customers, the ability to understand these data types, sources, locations, and flows — and ensure they align with relevant frameworks — is foundational to creating trust at scale. Documenting the full data flow is the first step in governing any autonomous system. If you can draw the flow, you can govern and secure it effectively.

From there, security-by-design and least-privilege architecture form the backbone of good governance. These practices ensure that data access is intentional, restricted, and auditable, supporting data quality, transparency, and accountability across the fleet. In robotics, a few principles consistently reinforce trust:

• Purpose limitation: Sensors capture only what is required for navigation, safety, task validation, or product improvement.
• Image anonymization: Any incidental human imagery is blurred before presentation or review.
• Encryption and access control: All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with access tightly governed by role-based permissions.
• Retention discipline: Data is kept only as long as it provides operational or product value, then securely deleted.

When providers explain these safeguards in plain language, governance becomes an enabler rather than a constraint — and trust becomes a differentiator rather than a hurdle.

Governance as a service differentiator

As deployments grow, governance becomes a competitive edge. Customers no longer just want performance metrics; they want assurance that their automation ecosystem behaves predictably and securely.

Robotics providers should demonstrate that assurance by:

• Providing access to a centralized data governance, privacy, and compliance repository for documentation, such as a Trust Center, that includes diagrams, security controls, and other architectural insights.
• Sharing third-party attestations or certifications, such as UL safety certification for key components and SOC 2 for cloud-based robotic services.
• Offering whitepapers or other published documents that clarify the robotic data flow, including how and where data is processed, transmitted, stored, and for how long.

When you can show exactly how data moves and who can access it, trust stops being an abstract goal and becomes part of your value proposition.

Preparing for a new regulatory landscape

The regulatory landscape for AI and robotics is maturing quickly. In the EU, new risk-based frameworks are formalizing documentation, transparency, and post-deployment monitoring. In the US, state-level obligations for companies using AI and autonomous systems continue to expand, with similar patterns emerging globally.

The best way to stay ahead is to engineer for principles, not headlines. Autonomous systems that already minimize, anonymize, encrypt, and evidence their decisions will adapt naturally as new laws arrive. Document how the system makes decisions—even reactive ones like obstacle avoidance—and make audits part of routine operations rather than exceptional events.

For the channel, readiness isn’t about predicting every regulation. It’s about building around stable, durable principles: minimization, encryption, explainability, and documented accountability. Autonomous systems grounded in these fundamentals can shift with whatever policy comes next.

Trust as operational ROI

Every managed service provider (MSP) knows the cost of an outage or breach. The same applies to autonomous systems. The more predictable and transparent your deployments are, the faster customers will adopt and renew.

Trust reduces friction across every stage of a partnership: procurement, onboarding, compliance, and support. In practice, that makes trust a measurable form of ROI.

The future of robotics in the channel won’t be defined by who moves fastest, but by who moves most responsibly.

Humanoid robots and people will be able to work truly side-by-side this year, according to the CEO of one leading robotics company.

In a discussion at Mobile World Congress (MWC), Peggy Johnson — who stepped in as CEO of Agility Robotics last year — shared what the company's Digit robot was capable of doing now, and what was expected to be achieved in the near future.

Johnson painted a picture of humans and machines working alongside each other without the need to segregate the machines for safety reasons.

The 1.7m-tall, 85kg-heavy Digit robots can currently lift 16kg in weight, with hopes that will increase to 25kg soon, she said. At the moment, that allows them to take on simple tasks in warehousing and logistics, such as collecting an object and moving it into a tray for another robot to take away.

The advent of generative AI allowed companies like Agility to take robotics that previously required heavy programming to be controlled via simple voice commands.

"We're able to overlay AI onto our traditionally controlled robot, and really supercharge its power," she said.

Human in the loop

But, humanoid robots remain limited. Johnson noted that demos of robots doing backflips or making coffee may catch attention, but that requires intense programming.

With automation alone, the reality of what's possible is much more basic — but still useful. She remarked that warehouses can be heavily automated, but still require a human to pick up parts or products and move them to where they're needed.

"We focused on what is actually possible today, and that is simple tasks, [such as] moving materials," she said, adding: "It's able to do work that's repetitive, can be somewhat dull, tasks that generally people don't like — and in fact there's about a million jobs in this space that are open in the US alone, they can't find people to fill these jobs."

Digit is already used in a warehouse facility in Atlanta, Johnson noted. However, she said that robotics can't take on all aspects of a human worker's role.

"It doesn't complain, doesn't fight with its coworkers," she laughed. "It just does the job.”

"It's augmenting somebody, who that was part of their job — for a few hours a day, they've got to move this product, and then they're over here doing something else," she said. Adding it "augments the human in the loop."

Imperfect AI

Notably, Johnson admitted that limitations in AI mean robots still need human colleagues to keep them on track. Johnson demonstrated a Digit robot on stage, telling it verbally via an iPad to pick up an item — a yellow sponge — and place it into a bin.

Slowly, the robot considered the command, before meticulously moving the item.

Even such a simple display could go wrong, she admitted: "It's why you don't want AI to completely control a robot right now."

However, such tasks were previously onerous to achieve, as they required detailed programming — and it's easier to just pick up the sponge yourself at that point. AI controls help avoid that burden, though building a workflow still takes time.

"You can give a command to a machine and it can act upon it," she said. "That's going to change everything."

The demonstration was powered by Google's Gemini 2 model, though Johnson said Agility supported the use of all AI models in its robotics.

"All the models operate slightly differently, and they're all right now building their robotics foundation models, which is why we became agnostic," she explained.

"We just wanted to swap in whichever one is working best for whatever use case."

Safety first

That said, there's much work that needs to be done, Johnson said, before these robots are capable of everything Agility's customers would like them to do.

Indeed, she said customers have said they'd like to be able to send a Digit down to the loading dock to pick up a box and bring it back to a workstation.

Beyond technology challenges, that would mean Digit has to move alongside humans. Right now, robotics must stay inside what's known as a "work cell", a defined space that humans don't enter for their own safety.

"Right now there are no humanoid robots who are certified to operate outside of a protected area," Johnson said, pinning the blame on the technology itself as well as regulators. "The big unlock [of potential for humanoid robots] is coming out of the work cell and being what's called 'cooperatively safe' around humans."

That would mean a Digit would be able to safely walk down to the loading bay, staying a safe distance from humans even if they did something unexpected.

Johnson said Agility would demonstrate robots operating outside of a work cell later this year. She said: "Agility has solved for that. It's a very challenging product problem."

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Since the arrival of the first industrial robots back in the 1970s, robots have been grabbing a bigger and bigger role in the world economy, in a way that few people have been able to see. 

“Everything you eat, or medication you take, or vehicle that you get into has been touched by robots,” says Simon Watson, a reader in robotics systems at the University of Manchester. Industrial robots are ubiquitous but invisible, he says: they toil in factories that you will never see inside, but they have a huge impact on your everyday life.

“Our entire world has already been shaped by robots. They do so much that we don’t ever see,” he adds.

But soon the robots will be hidden no more. A new generation of autonomous robots is taking its first steps, and while right now they are still mostly found in factories and warehouses, they’ll soon be out in the wider world. 

Autonomous robots are becoming more common

What’s certain is the number of robots around us continues to grow. According to the International Federation of Robots, we’re seeing record growth in the number of new robots, with over 550,000 new robots arriving in 2022, the most recent year for which it has data.

That means there are now roughly four million industrial robots in use around the world, with electronics, automotive, machinery, chemicals, and food – the industries most likely to use them. Around 290,000 of those new robots were installed in China, compared to 39,000 in the US.

And the growth is unlikely to stop: the industry body expects 700,000 new robots to arrive in 2026.

And then you have the 150,000 new service robots operating cleaning, hospitality, healthcare, and agriculture or delivering food. Consumer devices factor in here too, with around 40 million robot vacuum cleaners out there in the world, nimbly avoiding chair legs or giving lifts to cats right now. And of course, there are driverless cars, effectively autonomous robots on wheels, as well as drones which have applications for package delivery, fighting wildfires, and even helping deliver core healthcare services.

Autonomous robots in manufacturing

The first wave of robots in manufacturing didn’t have much in the way of intelligence or mobility. They were fixed in place and knew how to do one thing, like weld a part or paint a panel. 

And they kept away well away from humans.

“Industrial robots work really well because there are no humans. You automate a factory: it’s full of robots, but there’s no randomness, no chaos,” says Watson. Over the last decade, companies have been experimenting with giving robots more autonomy, gifting them the ability to take on more complex jobs and even start to mix with humans. 

There are a number of tech trends fuelling this growth in autonomous robots: cloud computing, edge computing, and 5G are making it easier to process data from robots and connect with them wherever they are. Machine learning (ML) and AI are also supporting developments in areas like computer vision, making it easier for robots to maneuver, sort and pick products, and engage with the world around them. But there is still plenty of work to do.

“The biggest challenge with autonomous robots at the moment, is that they don’t deal well with uncertainty, and humans are the most uncertain thing in the world. You try to put a robot into a human environment where people do random things, where you can’t predict what people are going to do, and there are big issues,” says Watson.

As a result, autonomous robots have so far sprung up largely in high-tech warehouses and factories which are effectively doubling as schools for the next generation of autonomous robots. These environments boast private 5G networks that allow robots to transmit and receive large amounts of data from external sensors in near real-time. The advent of 5G mmWave technology has improved this picture, as it allows for far higher throughput in areas of high congestion making it perfect for busy factory floors. 5G mmWave’s consistently low latency will also help autonomous robots react to their surroundings with little to no delay.

Compared to the street or a supermarket full of shoppers, a warehouse is a well-ordered space that isn’t going to change much. There isn’t too much to distract or confuse a robot as it works, perhaps moving pallets from one place to another or sorting and delivering items.

The real-world benefits of autonomous robots 

Autonomous robots can be used to automate the most intense manual labor, such as moving heavy boxes around a storage environment or performing repetitive tasks such as placing products onto a conveyor belt.

Amazon is probably one of the best-known robot innovators. The tech giant has a range of fully autonomous warehouse robots comprising around a dozen different systems and about 750,000 robots in total doing a variety of jobs. This includes Cardinal, which is able to sort packages using AI and computer vision and Proteus, an autonomous robot that can lift carts filled with goods. Its Hercules robot can lift up to 1,250 pounds, uses a 3D camera to navigate around a warehouse – and can identify staff wearing Wi-Fi transmitters so it can plot a path around them.

Other roles we are likely to see autonomous robots taking first are the ones that are too challenging and hazardous for people, like inspections of wind farms or nuclear power plants.

However, as the costs of autonomous robots slowly come down, there will be more and more scenarios where deploying them starts to make sense. Gradually the lessons learned in warehouses and other controlled settings will be used to allow robots to roam further. 

The key thing will be finding productive uses where the cost of the robot is reasonable compared to the value of the work that the robot is going to do, says Dwight Klappich, research vice president at tech analyst Gartner. “Most organizations that we talk to it’s not ‘if’ they are going to do robots. its ‘where when and how many?’,” he says.

Labor costs are going up but the real driver for many companies is that they just can’t get enough people or hold on to them, he says. He says this is an issue even in lower-cost labor environments because bosses complain their workforce can be unreliable. 

“They just don’t know who is going to show up for work in the morning,” he says. 

One perhaps unexpected area of growth for autonomous robots already is in customer-facing roles in hospitality. Robots are capable of delivering food and cleaning surfaces, with price points that make sense in the long term and free up human workers to spend more time interacting directly with customers

Social care is another sector where robots could help, but this may take another decade or so to be widespread. That’s because there are still quite a few hurdles to the deployment of autonomous mobile robots into the world around us. 

The hurdles autonomous robots face

It still takes a lot of expensive processing power for the real-time perception that these robots would need. As autonomous robots begin to employ ML, AI, or natural language processing (NLP) this processing burden will only increase and firms may be forced to equip robots with ‘local’ machine learning in a bid to cut costs.

More prosaically, battery life is one of the biggest limitations for mobile robots which can only operate for a few hours without needing to recharge. In many cases, autonomous robots can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which can be hard to justify except in cases where harm to workers is prevented or profits will be measurably improved through the introduction of autonomous robots. A firm grip on business intelligence (BI) and usage of big data analytics could help leaders assess the cost-benefit of autonomous robots in their workflow.

Will we ever see autonomous robots that look like us? This remains a point of contention. Humanoid robots might look cool (or terrifying depending on how many times you’ve seen The Terminator) but finding a use case for them is relatively tricky. But the biggest challenge for autonomous robots outside of controlled settings is that we haven’t really worked out all the rules for how they should behave and who gets the blame when things go wrong – and that human behavior is so hard to predict. 

“Robots interacting with humans is a big challenge - and that’s why you don’t see many of them around,” says Watson.

Artificial intelligence (AI), driverless cars, robotics, and other emergent technologies are already having dire climate consequences. Training a single large language model (LLM) creates the same carbon emissions of five cars over their lifetime, according to one academic paper. And it’s not just energy use, but it’s driving demand for rare-earth metals, while financial efficiencies in manufacturing can spark an increase in consumption – bad news for pollution, landfills, and emissions. And this is only the beginning.

At the moment, data centers and data transmission networks are already responsible for 0.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, though some pin the number closer to 2% – similar to global air travel emissions. The rule of thumb that a Google Search was on par with boiling a kettle has been rightly debunked, though beefing up its search engine with AI will unquestionably boost its carbon footprint – we just don’t know by how much, until that data is made available. And right now, it isn’t. 

The impact of AI on climate change

Making machine learning more accurate usually means creating bigger models with more parameters churning through ever bigger data sets for training. “Since AI models are, on average, getting bigger, their energy costs are definitely rising as well,” says Sasha Luccioni, climate lead at AI developer Hugging Face. “So far, all of the numbers and research are mostly about training AI models, but we actually have very limited information about the energy costs of their deployment. Since we are increasingly putting AI models in many products and services – think navigation, smartphones, voice assistants – the energy costs of that are consequential too.”

Research suggests training large machine learning models only makes up a tenth of energy use, with running the model making up the rest. That’s true whether it’s to analyze medical data sets or generate a goofy image for a meme. And that’s merely the energy cost of compute: Luccioni’s own research reveals that considering other carbon costs, such as manufacturing components, doubles the footprint. 

But, she notes, it’s worth knowing not all AI is necessarily gobbling up energy: it depends on the type and the use case. “A very small number of very large models – [such as] GPT-type models and other generative language models – are dominating the discourse when it comes to AI but, in reality, there’s a plethora of much smaller and more efficient models that are being used across the community, including for climate-positive applications like tracking deforestation or predicting the climate,” Luccioni says. “So it’s easy to think that all AI models are incredibly energy-intensive, but truly it’s only a small portion (that take up all the space right now).” In short, just because it’s AI, doesn’t mean it’s an energy hog. 

Of course, tech companies are keen to slash their energy use and, because of that, they’ve put significant effort into building dedicated hardware to boost performance and efficiency. In other words, these are already the optimized versions of such systems. What else could be done? Researchers have called for those building large models to publish energy usage, in the hopes of spurring an arms race not just in terms of capability but efficiency. 

The key to slashing the energy demands, and in turn the carbon cost, of AI and related technologies? “Transparency is crucial,” says Luccioni. “Organisations should report both the training costs: compute time, hardware used, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, etc, as well as inference efficiency (quantity of energy consumed per 100 queries, for instance). Otherwise, users are left in the dark regarding all of these factors and can’t use them to make informed decisions.”

The impact of driverless cars on climate change

Waymo’s automated cars are already ferrying passengers around the San Francisco Bay Area, as are the Alphabet-owned company’s main rival, GM’s Cruise. Both use similar technologies to let their vehicles see the world around them. LIDAR scanners paint a 3D picture by pinging light pulses off everything, and measuring how long it takes to return. Cameras ring the vehicles – for Waymo, there are 19 cameras on its smaller Chrysler Pacifica cars and 29 on the larger Jaguar I-PACE – as well as radar to help improve calculations of an object’s distance and speed despite weather such as rain, fog, or snow. 

All of that real-time data crunching chews through energy – though it’s difficult to know exactly how much, as that information isn’t made public and it will differ by car and by system. In 2018, researchers estimated that cars at the lower end of autonomy generate as much as 3Gb/sec of data, while cars at higher levels will have sensors spitting out as much as 40Gbit/sec of data. That figure will only have increased in the space of five years.

One challenge is understanding the growth in data processing and improvements in computing efficiency that are likely to happen before these cars become widely available, if they ever do. Academics at MIT modeled the future impact on emissions of driverless cars, finding one billion driverless cars on roads globally would lead to the same amount of emissions as all of the world’s IT data centers currently do. That’s based on the assumption that cars are used for just an hour a day, driven by a computer using 840W. 

“If we just keep the business-as-usual trends in decarbonization and the current rate of hardware efficiency improvements, it doesn’t seem like it is going to be enough to constrain the emissions from computing onboard autonomous vehicles,” said study author Soumya Sudhakar, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics, in a statement. “This has the potential to become an enormous problem. But if we get ahead of it, we could design more efficient autonomous vehicles that have a smaller carbon footprint from the start.” 

We should have plenty of time: the study looked at all of this happening by 2050. However, to avoid driverless cars contributing to climate change, computing hardware must double in efficiency every 1.1 years. Another option, the researchers note, is to improve the efficiency of the algorithms themselves, so they require less computing power in the first place, though the difficulty is managing this without impacting accuracy. 

The model doesn’t take into account autonomous cars being used differently than how we drive now, however. One idea often mooted is shifting car ownership to a shared, subscription model – essentially handing the keys to Alphabet et al and accessing a car via an app – which could potentially reduce the number of cars on the road in the first place, Still, if we’re all traveling via Waymo taxis, we’re going to need an awful lot of them. 

The impact of robotics on climate change

There’s more to the environmental impact of future technologies than energy use and subsequent emissions, however. For example, the rush to embed chips in everything means more mining of key materials, such as rare earth minerals. Plus, how we use such innovations matter: giving up on public transport for corporate-owned, driverless (or even flying) taxis could exacerbate urban traffic. 

Laurie Wright, a professor at Solent University, Southampton, points to the “rebound effect”: an economics observation that as we become more efficient at producing something, the price falls so we use it more. “You can play this out with AI: if we produce more stuff, more cheaply, more efficiently, that’s great – but if there’s more stuff to buy at a cheaper price, that can potentially drive up emissions,” says Wright. 

Consider robots. They can take on dirty, dangerous jobs from humans, which is good news for the people who used to suffer those roles. But as robotics become more advanced, they can go further than people ever could, opening up areas of our world – and beyond – that previously were safe from environmental degradation simply by being too hard to reach. For example, robotics could allow mining in ever more remote and dangerous regions, such as deep seas – and even in space. “Is that actually a better thing to do?” asked Wright. “It’s always a complex balancing act.”

How can the industry innovate sustainably?

Should we stop using ChatGPT write silly sonnets, grammar check our WhatsApp messages, and other low-value queries? Loïc Lannelongue, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s department of public health who runs the Green Algorithms carbon calculator, doesn’t think so – most of what we do for fun has a carbon impact. The onus shouldn’t be on those at home playing around and exploring technology to limit the carbon impact; instead, it should lie in the hands of the people building such systems. “They’re paying the energy bills, so they know what the carbon footprint is,” said Lannelongue.

He agrees with the argument that instead of an arms race for larger models, AI developers should publish the carbon footprint of training and using their models. We could then choose not the biggest, but the most efficient. “It’s just a cost-benefit analysis that we need to do beforehand,” says Lannelongue. “And the only way is to know the cost.”

Without counting the cost, there’s no reason to reduce computing use. The classic example, Lannelongue says, is tuning the hyperparameters of a machine learning model; it’s impossible to know when you’ve hit the best combination of parameters, so researchers run many different combinations to find performance improvements. “Imagine it’s 5pm, you’ve been running tests all day, and you think you’ve hit the plateau [in performance],” he says. “As financial costs are negligible, it’s tempting to just let it run overnight and do as many tests as it can, because I’m sleeping and it doesn’t matter… but the extra half percent you might get could get you published at NeurIPS.”

That’s the sort of behavior Lannelongue wants researchers developing AI to think twice about. “The whole point of the project is not to say we shouldn’t do computing anymore,” he says. “We just need to acknowledge that there is a carbon cost.” And hopefully planting that seed will remind people to only compute where necessary, to not waste energy, and to double-check their work before running complex calculations: “It’s happened to everyone that you run a massive thing and only at the end realize you forgot to write the outputs… and have nothing to show for it.”

Tracking the impact, helped by projects such as Hugging Face and Green Algorithms, can help us understand the environmental costs of future technologies, and hopefully encourage developers to build in mitigations such as energy efficiency. But in the meantime, adding generative AI to search, driverless automation to cars, and using robots for everything else might be convenient and intriguing for us, but less so for the planet. When we talk about human-centric, ethical AI, we should probably consider clean air and tolerable temperatures as key components of safe technology. 

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Schwietzer continued, "We built a platform that non-expert developers can use to pick and choose the functionality they need and easily configure it into their robot software. We also added all the tools needed for the important tasks of deployment and operation."

MOV.AI’s Robotics Engine Platform comes with an open plugin framework that allows developers to integrate MOV.AI with third-party algorithms and drivers quickly. A 3D physics simulator integrated into the MOV.AI IDE enables rapid robot software testing without physical robots.

Advanced autonomy algorithms, including 3D simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), enable localization accuracy of about 2 cm in 85% of dynamic environments. Additionally, built-in automated sensor calibration protects against vehicle degradation caused by sudden temperature changes, vibrations, or accidents.

Using scene editors, manufacturers can define operational layers, including zones, key points, and virtual paths for behavior planning and real-time decision-making.

"Until now, AMR manufacturers had to choose between long and expensive inhouse development and 3rd party black-box solutions with hardware limitations," says Motti Kushnir, MOV.AI CEO.

Kushnir added, "We are changing that. For the first time, companies have everything they need to easily build advanced robots that are simple to deploy and operate. By providing an end-to-end system that contains everything that is needed to create great robot software - whether it's integrating 3rd party hardware, selecting and integrating advanced autonomy algorithms, visual deployment and operation tools or integration with automation environments - MOV.AI frees manufacturers to focus on what makes them unique."

After a spate of outrages and protests in recent years it’s clear that policing needs to change. Technology could be the key – but ideas such as robot police, facial-recognition software and AI won’t eradicate fundamental challenges including low budgets, internet-savvy criminals and human racism.

Take facial recognition. Last year in Detroit police wrongly arrested Robert Williams for shoplifting, based on an incorrect identification by facial-recognition software. Williams was arrested at work and spent the night in jail, despite having nothing to do with the case.

We haven’t seen such headlines in the UK so far, but it could be only a matter of time. While the Court of Appeal has ruled against the use of facial recognition by South Wales Police, on the grounds of privacy and data protection, but Fraser Sampson, commissioner for the retention and use of biometric materials, told the Financial Times in May that police would eventually “have no alternative but to use facial recognition, along with any other technology that is reasonably available to them”.

Indeed, the Metropolitan Police has already started trialling the tech to scan crowds for wanted individuals, although the results have shown a low level of accuracy. Across three tests in 2020, the Met scanned 13,000 faces, from which the system picked out eight individuals – but seven of them turned out not to be the wanted suspects.

Robot cops have also failed to become a widespread reality, despite the best efforts of technology-minded police forces. In New York, police tried bringing a Boston Dynamics robot to respond to a home invasion in the Bronx, and then to a gun-related incident at an apartment in Manhattan – but this raised heated accusations of overly aggressive policing. A few weeks later the robot police dog, named Digidog, was retired from service.

And what of machine learning? Its use continues to be fraught with challenges. In the US in 2016, research by ProPublica revealed that a system called COMPAS, designed to assess the likelihood of a convicted criminal reoffending, exhibited a bias against black people. In the UK, the Home Office spent £10 million designing an AI system to predict gun and knife crime, but it was never used after a flaw was spotted in the training data, making its predictions useless.

Critics argue that such technologies have no place in policing, not just because they remain largely unproven but because erroneous outcomes are potentially life damaging. Then again, human police are already heavily criticised for bias, including disproportionately targeting BAME people. Is it possible that technology can make policing work better for all of society?

Motivating forces

Owen West is a retired chief superintendent at West Yorkshire Police who now researches policing at Keele University. He believes that, even in the face of criticism and risks, police forces in the UK are keen to trial new systems such as facial recognition, to push back against a long-held suspicion that the police are overlooking opportunities and cost savings. “Governments think greater technology can reduce the number of officers or police staff, and therefore provide policing at less cost than conventional approaches,” West tells us.

There’s pressure from the security and defence industry too, he adds, which may give away technology for free or at a discount. “It’s often big business in the security and surveillance sectors that seeks to lobby for greater technologies in policing,” West says. “Much of this is seen in the overlap between the defence industries – surplus military equipment and technologies being made available at significant discount to police departments in the US.”

Such projects may seem like a good deal, but West warns that police should be wary of handing over large, valuable datasets to commercial partners. “The police are providing gold dust to such companies but never realise the monetary value they present,” he notes. “If forces were really effectively partnering, they would ensure that the commercial growth and revenue of the product they have hosted or trialled is paid for by the company. All too often the company has the commercial advantage.”

Whatever the balance of power, Fraser Sampson has already signalled the government’s direction, telling the Financial Times that the use of AI is an “inevitable… increasingly necessary component of policing”.

Problems with tech

One of the core problems with AI, whether in facial recognition or data analytics, is limited or poor-quality datasets end up encoding bias into the decision-making process, meaning the same mistakes humans make are replicated by digital systems.

For example, Adriane Chapman, professor in electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton and a Turing Fellow, points to institutional policing problems that have been highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement. “We are at a point in society when we acknowledge that a change in responses and actions must happen, and yet the technology takes in what happens in the past, learns from it and repeats it,” she says.

“Humans bring with them biases,” says Chapman. “It’s attractive to try to take them out of the equation using a technical tool. But the tech to work through these biases, and how to mitigate them, isn’t quite ready yet.” In fact, by mechanising such faults, we risk exacerbating them. “One officer cannot generate too many false arrests too much of the time,” West points out. “With facial recognition and AI, what we see is this potentially speeded up and localised.”

Even the best of intentions may not go far enough. The COMPAS system we mentioned above was devised specifically because human judges were observed to be biased. “The goal was to take that horrible human bias out of the loop, by inserting a coolly clinical machine,” says Chapman. “Indeed, the data that was used to train the machine had the race variable hidden.”

Yet that wasn’t enough to avoid race becoming an issue, for two reasons. “First, it was created by the previous biased sentencing/bail decisions from the past,” Chapman says. “Second, there are many other variables in the data that are related to race – for example, zip code – so race is effectively not hidden. In effect, we’ve used data that we know is biased to train the machines.” Which leads to a crucial question: “[When] we know that there are errors in the system, can we justifiably strip someone of their freedoms based on it?”

Fixing the problems

There are ways to deal with the downsides and imperfections of such technologies. One is to restrict them to roles where mistakes are less likely to have serious consequences. “If a false ID leads to someone being shot by police or incarcerated, as we’re seeing across the US, then it is very dangerous,” Chapman says. “However, what if facial recognition were being used to identify trafficked and vulnerable individuals? In this case, the societal good may make the use by police palatable.”

She also points to the creation of frameworks to help developers consider the risks and impact of new technologies at an early stage. But while these can focus attention on the potential impact of a project on police and citizens, it remains difficult to assess the further knock-on effects of such ideas. “There is ongoing work looking at how to mitigate bias in datasets, or adjust the models themselves to be more fair, but still much work to be done,” Chapman says.

Even getting companies to use the existing frameworks, limited as they are, is a challenge in itself. “Why would a company who needs to meet a bottom line and sell a product engage with these?” Chapman asked. “What we need is some regulation.” That could be coming, with the EU working on AI systems regulation.

AI systems can also be monitored by those using them, by tracking mistakes and using that data to inform decision-making. “We know these systems have error rates,” says Chapman. “The implications of any action or inaction should be weighed with respect to those error rates.”

“For instance, the Avon and Somerset Police uses a data-driven approach, not to target crime or bad guys, but to police the police and identify vulnerable individuals. In this case, a false accusation does not impact a member of the public or incarcerate anyone.” That police force does use algorithms and AI for a wider range of areas, however.

What’s next

That last point may be the key to safely using AI in policing. Rather than letting technology make decisions about who to arrest and who to refuse bail, it can be used for positive purposes.

For example, West predicts that police will turn to technology that allows them to understand vulnerability. “The ability to walk down a street and receive alerts – who needs a welfare check visit, which house was recently burgled and could be revisited, any vulnerable children at an address, women and young girls at risk in a particular home – that sort of operational picture,” he says.

West calls such systems “descriptive technologies,” saying they help paint a picture of operational context and make using data easier, while AI will fit into “predictive policing” such as crime-pattern analysis. That will take time to perfect – or even make good enough for limited use – and will require public support and trust. “The notion of Big Brother remains strong, and I cannot see a great deal of public confidence in such technology anytime soon,” he says.

Fundamentally, West argues that technology should enhance human policing, rather than replacing it. “Where technology adds value is in the connectivity between the police and the communities they serve,” he says. “Technology for people to easily connect, communicate and do business with their local officers, technology for people to ascertain things they currently have to phone the police to find out about. In other words, technology that makes the customer experience much better than it currently is.” Forget robotic police dogs – this is how technology could actually help police serve and protect better.

Velodyne Lidar has announced ANYbotics will equip its autonomous robots with Velodyne Puck Lidar sensors.

Designed for dexterity, ANYbotics’ four-legged robot ANYmal autonomously navigates uneven industrial terrains. Its built-in depth sensors perceive obstacles in confined and open spaces. Additionally, ANYmal's inspection payload provides visual, thermal, and acoustic insights for machinery and infrastructure performance monitoring.

Puck Lidar sensors by Velodyne offer a real-time 3D perception of data for object tracking, mapping, and classification. With high-resolution image data and a wide vertical field of view, the sensors can detect the shape and movement of objects with low reflectivity, regardless of their composition.

ANYbotics will include Puck Lidar sensors in its robotic inspection module to help ANYmal map industrial environments, detect obstacles, and avoid potential collisions. The arrangement is of particular importance in low-light or rugged environments.

“Velodyne’s lidar sensors provide ANYmal with a constant stream of high-resolution, 3D information about its surroundings, helping the robot safely map and patrol complex and harsh environments,” said Daniel Lopez Madrid, team lead of perception at ANYbotics.

“The sensors enable precise localization and mapping capabilities our robots need to understand the physical environment they are operating in and any changes such as moving people and objects.”

Velodyne Lidar executive director Erich Smidt added, “ANYbotics robotic solutions excel at automating industrial inspections that provide plant operators information to maximize equipment uptime and improve safety. By using Velodyne’s lidar, their robots can autonomously navigate complex multi-story environments and find the quickest route to perform missions. During operation, the robot’s system can safely avoid obstacles and reliably move over rough terrain.”

Infostretch has teamed with robotic process automation (RPA) firm Automation Anywhere to help businesses streamline their manual tasks and workflows.

Per the deal, Infostretch will link its digital engineering infrastructure with Automation Anywhere’s intelligent automation platform, Automation 360.

The pluggable architecture of Automation 360 enables enterprises to automate business processes across a wide range of applications and platforms, including SaaS and legacy systems. ISO27001-certified, Automation 360 offers an integrated approach to security that includes identity management, data encryption, auditing, incident response, and application security.

The Infostretch-Automation Anywhere partnership is geared toward enabling end-to-end automation, also known as hyperautomation. Bringing RPA and artificial intelligence (AI) together, Infostrech will align its cloud engineering services with Automation 360's core RPA and hyperautomation offerings.

The combined solution will enable businesses to automate repetitive processes with RPA Workspace automation solution; extract data from complex documents via IQ Bot intelligent document processing solution; and gain actionable insights through Bot Insight RPA analytics.

Additionally, enterprises can discover ROI opportunities through the Discovery Bot process discovery solution.

“Businesses understand the benefits of intelligent automation, but oftentimes lack experience in knowing where and how to implement it to achieve truly transformational results,” said Derek Toone, senior vice president of global channel partners and alliances at Automation Anywhere.

Toone continued, “By progressing their automation journey with digital engineers of Infostretch’s calibre, combined with the power of Automation Anywhere’s cloud-native RPA platform, enterprises can fast-track automation adoption and advance their business agility.”

CEO and founder of Infostretch Rutesh Shah added, “Don’t underestimate the power of hyperautomation in reinventing how businesses operate. By partnering with Automation Anywhere, we’re able to extend the intelligent automation services we offer to enterprise customers, taking RPA initiatives out of their technology siloes and implementing faster, smarter end-to-end automation. This is digital transformation in action.”

Google parent company Alphabet has launched a new company called Intrinsic that aims to make industrial robots easier to program.

Originally a project within Google's X research group, Intrinsic has graduated as an independent company within Alphabet. That means it will leave X's rapid prototyping environment and seek development partners.

CEO Wendy Tan-White explained that conventional industrial robots are difficult to program, often taking hundreds of hours of manual programming to perfect repetitive tasks. Some tasks, such as sanding surfaces of different shapes and sizes or plugging in electrical cords, are beyond robots' reach because they require a subtle awareness of environments and surfaces.

Intrinsic wants robots to perform tasks like these. It has also been working on programming multiple robots to work together on complex tasks.

Intrinsic uses various techniques, including artificial intelligence (AI), to make these programming tasks easier by 'teaching' robots how to perform them. The company has also experimented with deep learning, which uses more layers in a neural network to refine machine learning outcomes, and reinforcement learning, which uses feedback on robot performance to improve its attempts at a task over time.

Other algorithms in its toolbox include automated perception and motion planning, and simulation and force control so robots can adjust how much pressure they apply.

The company wants robots to apply their training to similar tasks without engineers reprogramming them again from scratch. It also hopes that by becoming aware of their surroundings, they will adapt to changing environments rather than restricting themselves to specific fixed conditions.

The idea is to make robots more affordable and usable, opening the technology to more businesses. This will also allow companies to make products closer to where they're used, making supply chains more efficient, Tan-White said.

The Intrinsic team spent five years developing the technology inside the X building.

Google has dabbled in robotics before, acquiring Boston Dynamics in 2013 before folding it into its Replicant robotics division after reorganizing into Alphabet in 2015. Internal rifts and concerns over brand optics compelled it to sell the company to Softbank in 2017.

Google acquired other robotics companies in 2013, including Redwood Robotics, which focused on making robotic arms that are simple to program, and robotic camera systems maker Bot & Dolly.

Intrinsic is the latest initiative to graduate from X, following in the footsteps of autonomous driving startup Waymo and drone delivery company Wing.

Other projects still in development within Google X include the Everyday Robot program, a separate robotics program researching whether robots can operate in changeable environments. Its team developed a robot that could sort recycling waste, which is a challenging task given the unpredictable contents of recycling bins.

The worldwide medical telepresence robots market is expected to increase to $159.5 million by 2028, according to a new analyst report.

Published by Grand View Research, the report said the market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5% from 2021 to 2028. The growing adoption of telepresence robots in the health care sector and product innovations catering to the increasing demand have contributed to this growth.

The report also said that with an increasingly elderly population with chronic illnesses requiring regular monitoring, demand for such robots in home situations will only grow.

The telepresence robot market experienced solid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic because of increasing deployments of such devices in hospitals worldwide.

The report cited one example in the Yatharth Hospital in Noida, which deployed Mitra robots to help health care providers deliver care with telepresence technology.

In another example, the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington used the InTouch Health Robot Vici to aid the virtual presence and communication between doctors and patients.

The report added that features enabling two-way communication and connecting from any location to monitor patients remotely further boost the demand for medical telepresence robots.

The report said several companies are breaking into the market, offering technologically advanced robots, introducing new features catering to the current demand, and bolstering R&D efforts. These factors also boost the adoption of medical telepresence robots.

The report added that most governments worldwide were taking initiatives to support artificial intelligence and robotics, attracting new entrants to enter the market.

In 2020, North America dominated the market with a revenue share of over 40%, thanks to the higher adoption of artificial intelligence and robotics in the health care sector and the increasing number of players in the region. In addition, the rise in disposable income, the growing geriatric population, and the increasing prevalence of chronic illnesses are expected to support the demand for medical telepresence robots.

The report found that last year, hospitals and assisted living facilities held the largest share of the medical telepresence robots market at over 70%. However, the home use telepresence robot segment is set to increase at the highest CAGR of 19.5% over the forecast period due to the increase in the geriatric population, rise in the number of patients with chronic illnesses needing regular monitoring, and the availability of some affordable telepresence robots in the market.

Mobile robots dominated the market with a revenue share of over 65% in 2020 and are expected to witness the fastest growth over the forecast period.

Analysts said this growth was because of features such as autonomous navigation, adjustable height, head motion, and obstacle avoidance that enable smooth and efficient delivery of services and virtual monitoring, thereby facilitating effective teleconsultation.

Hyundai has completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of Boston Dynamics from SoftBank.

The purchase, first announced in December 2020, will see Hyundai take an 80% controlling interest in the robotics manufacturer, while SoftBank will retain 20% of the equity through an affiliate company.

Google acquired Boston Dynamics, which was founded in 1992 as an MIT spinoff, in 2013, before its parent company Alphabet sold it to SoftBank in 2017.

Boston Dynamics launched its first commercial robot, Spot, in June 2020, and this dog-like robot has since been used by bomb squads and law enforcement units. Users can attach a robotic arm to Spot and use it to light and inspect items, to manipulate valves, flip levers, and open doors.

The company's robots are predominantly designed for use in construction and inspection, but it's also building capabilities in warehousing automation with its robot called Stretch. This new robot will launch as a pilot in March and enter commercial production in 2022.

Stretch will help move boxes in warehouses, beginning with truck unloading, and it will eventually evolve to handle order building, according to Boston Dynamics. Stretch will also offer Pick, a system that uses machine learning to unload up to 700 boxes per hour from pallets and onto conveyor belts.

Hyundai already has significant in-house robotics expertise. It debuted the MEX robot, which helps people with paraplegia walk, at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The following year, Hyundai launched VEX and CEX, which were wearable exoskeletons to help protect and strengthen workers. In 2019, Hyundai revealed a service robot that helps complete hotel-focused tasks.

When the companies initially announced the acquisition, Hyundai said Boston Dynamics' expertise in 3D vision and manipulation using biped and quadruped robots aligned well with its expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and human-robot interaction.

Hyundai plans to expand its presence into the market for humanoid robots, developing robots for various tasks, including caregiving in hospitals.

Recycling robotics company AMP Robotics has announced it’s raised $55 million in a funding round led by XN.

Valor Equity Partners, GV, and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Closed Loop Partners also participated in the funding round.

AMP said it’ll use the funds to scale its business operations and develop new artificial intelligence (AI) applications that can integrate into material-recycling facilities. The startup also aims to increase its customers’ recycling rates.

“We are excited to partner with AMP as Matanya and the team continue to build an exceptional and category-defining business," said Gaurav Kapadia, XN founder. "AMP's technology radically improves the economics and efficiency of recycling and creates transformational long-term value for customers, the economy, and the environment."

AMP Cortex, AMP Robotics’ high-speed robotic sorting system, uses AI to handle sorting, selecting, and placing recyclables. The system segregates a wide range of materials, including metals, batteries, capacitors, plastics, PCBs, wires, cartons, bottle caps, cardboard, cups, clamshells, lids, aluminum, metal, mixed wood, asphalt, bricks, concrete, and mixed plastics. It can also sort plastic film by color, clarity, and opacity.

Here’s how it works: A three-armed picker robot with an adaptable frame location and height sits on a conveyor belt where a moveable steel frame holds it in place. AMP Neuron, which uses personal computer vision to distinguish visual attributes, feeds the picker robot the information it needs to sort the materials.

AMP Neuron also processes millions of pictures via AMP Robotics’ cloud network to more accurately sort objects, study new classes of components, adapt to packaging style and lighting alterations, and recover higher-demand materials, including paper, tissue, cardboard, and other packaging.

AMP Insights, a visualization tool that monitors material stream activity and functionality, taps into the system and delivers real-time notifications via text or email to keep facility managers abreast of gear difficulties and hazards.

“AMP is a transformational company in the global waste industry, similar to companies we have partnered with in other sectors,” said Sam Teller, partner at Valor Equity Partners. “We believe deeply in AMP’s potential to update and scale our waste infrastructure to meet ramping demand for recycled content and to create a more sustainable, circular economy.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the material-recycling industry, as social-distancing protocols have limited the human workforce. This is a key reason the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates waste-sorting robotics will be a $12.26 billion industry by 2024.

Also boosting its popularity is its 80-item-per-minute pick rate, which AMP Robotics claims outperforms human workers.

This latest round of funding follows a $16 million Series A round in November 2019.

If you were born in 1920, you could expect to live for just over 55 years if you were a man, and almost 60 if you were a woman. The average boy born today, however, will reach almost their 90th birthday, while girls will hit their 92nd. Lifespans have been extended by decades, but does our quality of life suffer as a result?

Getting older isn’t only a matter of adding a few more candles to the cake and accepting that music was “better in my day”, it also brings a vast range of physical changes. The functions of our liver, kidneys and other organs gradually decline; muscles and joints wear out; our immune system starts to put its feet up. The brain can even reduce in volume as we age. On top of that, there’s the risk of developing chronic illnesses. The longer someone lives, the more likely they are to pick up conditions such as dementia, heart disease and cancer.

Getting older comes with benefits too, of course. Older people are more likely to be politically engaged, be able to enjoy greater amounts of leisure time, have better problem-solving abilities and enjoy a healthy sex life – but there’s no denying that ageing has formidable challenges.

So how can tech help old age be the best years of your life? There are three main areas that must be tackled: Physical health, mental health and social circumstances, which covers everything else from contact with family and friends to a suitable home environment. The tech industry has all three in its sights.

The doctor on your wrist

Older age is linked with a whole host of chronic diseases. To age well, we need to delay their arrival or prevent their onset altogether.

Wearables may have started out as a way for the über-fit to measure their daily workouts, but the devices are now being recast as a medical tool. One of the earliest hints of how useful wearables could be for healthcare was the addition of ECG functionality to the Apple Watch – an unobtrusive way of measuring the heartbeat that could also flag up if the wearer is at greater risk of developing atrial fibrillation, a heart condition that can cause strokes.

While medical-type tools such as ECGs are a rarity in wearables today, future generations of the devices are likely to come with even more sophisticated sensors. Samsung watches look likely to include blood pressure-monitoring in the near future, while non-invasive blood glucose sensors that don’t require a drop of blood for analysis are also in the works. It’s easy to imagine that they’ll eventually be incorporated into wearables or smartwatches to monitor diabetes.

By gathering data on the early signs of disease through wearables, older people and their doctors can step in earlier, either making changes to prevent conditions developing or catching them sooner, improving the chances management will keep the condition under control. “The notion that patients or consumers are able already to manage their health and disease with easy-to-use technologies, smartphone apps, health sensors, at-home lab tests and so on… creates a new game when it comes to disease management,” said Dr Bertalan Meskó, director of The Medical Futurist Institute. “This is going to have the biggest impact on the lives of people in the ageing population.”

Using wearables to move from reactive to proactive healthcare will be like moving from black and white to colour TV, said Sumi Helal, professor and chair in digital health at Lancaster University’s Centre for Ageing Research. “The care system lives in the dark until an event has happened, and then you seek help and a consultation, and receive some care… How can we compare this to something that provides us with a continuous view? It will completely change everything for the benefit of the older adults, [and] for the benefit of the care system itself, where things would be more informed and with less error, and at less cost.”

Of course, all that data is only useful if doctors and other medical professionals can access it, rather than it just sitting in the user’s device. While it’s still relatively rare, data from patients’ devices and home readings is increasingly being integrated with their health records. However, wearables can generate a deluge of data that it would be impossible for human clinicians to keep on top of, which is where AI physicians will step in. In future, readings from wearables and other health data-gathering systems will be fed into patients’ medical records, where they’ll be analysed by AI to pick out signs of changes that could indicate disease.

Expect to see more emphasis placed on data from wearable devices in future, due to the changes wrought by the coronavirus outbreak, such as a rise in telehealth. “Covid-19 showed us that it’s not a luxury anymore,” Helal said. “We do need these things.”

Later-life monitoring

There are a raft of futuristic technologies that also have potential to help older people to both live and work for longer.

As we get older, our muscle bulk tends to fall – a natural process known as sarcopenia – which is why some companies in the motor industry have started giving staff exoskeletons, allowing factory-floor staff to work with heavier loads in later life. The exoskeletons are essentially frames that fit around parts of the body, usually the arms and torso, taking some of the strain out of physical work. Exoskeletons are reportedly already being used by some Japanese firms to enable workers to carry on in their posts into their seventies (whether most people would want to work that long is another matter).

Daigo Orihara, CEO of Japanese exoskeleton manufacturer Innophys, said the hardware can help older people keep doing the activities they enjoy, as well as extend their working life. “Exoskeletons would play important roles to help elderly people who want to stay active,” Orihara said. “After retirement from their jobs, many people enjoy farming, gardening, and hiking as hobbies, but as they become older, they experience pain in their lower backs and knees due to weakening muscle and ageing joints. I believe exoskeletons reduce the load on the body, allowing people with these problems to do their hobbies without much physical pain… For those who do not want to retire and want to stay longer in their physical work, such as farming, construction, and warehouse, exoskeletons also would be used to help them keep in the business.”

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs)are another sci-fi-esque tech that could one day help with conditions linked to ageing. Strokes, caused by a bleed or blockage of a blood vessel in the brain, can cause brain tissue to die off, leaving people with limb paralysis as well as problems with their sense of touch and speech, among other things. BCIs – which translate brain signals into code that machines can understand and vice versa – are only experimentally used now, but they hold huge potential for enabling those with disabilities to regain function they may have lost or, if they can’t, to control robotic prostheses that can replicate the sort of things their limbs used to do.

The most advanced BCIs, which could translate neural signals into speech or complex commands for robotics, aren’t likely to be in common use for a few years, but simple head-worn devices that could allow people to type with their brains – that is, when you think words, they could automatically be inputted into a device – or control actions on a computer are closer than you might think. Facebook is already working on thought-to-speech tech and recently bought BCI company CTRL-labs. For older people who might have lost the strength or dexterity in their hands, BCIs could offer a way of continuing to interact with their personal devices using thought alone, helping the elderly keep in touch with friends and family.

It’s not only joints and muscles that wear out in older age. Around two-

thirds of transplants happen in people over 50. Bioprinting – 3D printing with human cells instead of plastic – could offer a solution to the problem of a shortage of donor organs.

Once a small piece of tissue has been extracted from the person in need of a new organ, the cells in that tissue can be multiplied to make a pool that the bioprinter can use. The cells are pushed out through the printer onto a 3D scaffold that gives the organ structure. Using bioprinted organs has several advantages over donated ones: organs grown from your own cells won’t run the risk of rejection by your body, won’t require drugs to suppress the immune system for the rest of your life and will be made to exactly the right dimensions.

Researchers have already used the technique to create flat skin tissue, as well as hollow structures, such as blood vessels. Making full size organs is proving trickier due to the amount of blood flow they need and diverse functions that they perform, but the prospect of a fully bioprinted organ is getting closer: researchers at Tel Aviv University’s School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology have used bioprinting to construct a tiny version of the heart.

Treating mental health

Health goes beyond the physical: ageing can bring with it increased risk of isolation, cognitive decline and dementia.

Some of the most effective ways to stave off loneliness are also some of the simplest: regular contact with friends and family through services such as Zoom when in-person visits aren’t possible, for example. Whether you consider a Zoom call or a Skype meeting is a decent replacement for a face-to-face chat is likely to depend on age: tomorrow’s pensioners are likely to feel more comfortable with a virtual chat than today’s generation. “Our current millennials, or those younger than that, they might just about get away with getting similar enjoyment to face-to-face because that’s how they interact and have done from their very young formative years, whereas our older people, it’s by the by,” explained Dr Mani Santhanakrishnan, a consultant old-age psychiatrist. “Face-to-face is something they really miss. That one-to one, face-to-face connection is important.”

Technologies designed to counter loneliness in old age have received a boost from a surprising quarter: the coronavirus outbreak. “What has really changed, and actually it’s going to expedite the entire process of research and these things coming onto the market, is Covid-19,” said Chandni Mathur, a senior industry analyst who covers healthcare at analysts Frost & Sullivan. “Loneliness is something which a lot of people are experiencing right now because of being in lockdown and quarantined.”

As a result, the market for technology to help loneliness in the wider population could help drive the development of technology that will be useful for older people. “I think social robots and virtual reality/augmented reality will be taken up pretty fast,” she added.

VR could provide a way of addressing anxiety and depression, while people who are housebound or struggle with mobility could use VR as a method of travelling without leaving the house – a way of revisiting familiar locations or journeying to places that have always been on their bucket lists. If this seems far-fetched, a team at the University of Tokyo has already trialled virtual holidays with several care home residents, showing them 360˚ footage of locations including Hawaii and Venice, and found it had a dramatic effect: it encouraged one chairbound resident to stand and walk. VR can also help address loneliness by bringing users together with distant family members in one (virtual) location.

More low-tech systems have their place too, said Santhanakrishnan, such as simple prompts on devices to remind seniors to take care of their mental health – similar to phone notifications when it’s time to take their medication. “It could be ‘you’re due for your mindfulness’ or something like that,” he said. “If we know that, when they wake up in the morning, they will get very anxious, they could have that three minutes of breathing space or a mindful exercise that could be helpful. Then in the future we might be able to tailor-make a programme that will suit them.”

The social environment

Research has found that most older people would rather “age in place” – continue to live at home – rather than move to assisted living or into a care home. The idea of using a suite of technologies to make homes more senior-friendly has been around for several decades. In the 1990s, for example, the Japanese government sponsored the creation of several “Welfare Techno Houses”, experimental dwellings where new technologies designed to improve the quality of life for elderly and disabled residents were tested, including systems for home automation and remote healthcare.

Those futuristic dreams might now be coming true, thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet of Things and voice-controlled devices. With smart speakers now morphing into fully-fledged home assistants – hubs for controlling everything from lights to blinds to TVs and fans – smart homes can help older people with poor eyesight or difficulties with using their hands to control the mechanics of their homes, as well as keep up with the news and weather and other activities of daily living, such as shopping. “These types of technologies that can translate voice into action are going to be very useful,” said William Kearns, president of the International Society for Gerontechnology.

Smart homes could also help older adults in other ways by offering remote monitoring. Cameras coupled to AI systems can detect when the resident has had a fall, for example, while Kearns’ research has shown that sensors that can detect changes in an individual’s patterns of movement around their home are crucial.

“It could be that this movement pattern change, a change in someone’s flight path, so to speak, could precede a fall, and it could precede a full blown urinary tract infection… it could give the physician and opportunity to intervene before it became severe enough that the person with a fever has had to be hospitalised. These are the types of things that might be able to be done from data coming from sensor systems that look at where people are physically in space, and how they move about,” Kearns said.

Data gathered from even the most mundane of household fixtures and fittings could help protect elderly residents. A bath alarm can alert someone if they’ve forgotten to turn off a tap, a toilet being visited more frequently than usual could signal the onset of a urinary tract infection (often a cause of serious delirium in the elderly), an empty fridge or unslept-in bed can suggest someone whose mental health is decline.

Having sensors to monitor an elderly person’s home can make their friends and family – and the resident – feel more secure, but such security can come at the price of the privacy and dignity of the older person.

“The principle behind these things is that sensors will pick up the changes in your everyday activity patterns, or in your body temperature, or in your movement pattern,” said Gloria Gutman, vice-president of the International Longevity Centre Canada and professor emerita at the Department of Gerontology of Simon Fraser University. “If it doesn’t fit what you normally do, it will alert somebody. In theory that sounds okay, I guess, as long as somebody can get to you when you need it, and it’s not going to cost you too much for that service. Then there are also some privacy issues: would you want your kid to know when you get up and when you go to bed, or if you flush the toilet or not? With some of these things, we’re capable of making them work, but do we want them?”

Autonomous cars are another technology likely to enable a more comfortable old age. For many seniors, giving up driving can be a wrench, and can affect their ability to socialise as well as undertake everyday tasks, such as shopping or attending hospital appointments. “If you can’t drive yourself, but if you’re able to have access to an autonomous car, that’s liberating,” Gutman added.

People, not patients

Older adults are a huge, untapped market that tech companies are rushing to meet – but all too often they’re foisting technology onto elderly users that doesn’t actually meet their needs. So, while the market might be substantial, it’s also increasingly discerning.

“What is important to note for the companies who are making this technology is that the population that they’re targeting is also very well aware of technology now, and they don’t want to be treated like patients, but they want to be treated like customers who are actually shopping for an experience and not just being forced into doing something,” said Frost & Sullivan’s Mathur.

To get tech companies to make better products for seniors, older users will need to be involved in the design process, with their experiences informing how the hardware and software is glued together. “The key with these technologies is to ensure that the older people, they own the data, they understand how data will be used, and so on, so they’re more in control of their care needs,” said Nesta’s Mac Manus. “One of the issues with these technologies that we’ve found is sometimes they feel like they’re not really co-designed with older people. One of the things we talk about with technology is how it can be really deeply co-designed and co-produced with the end user because that also makes it useful.”

Technology for old age will also need to be designed for a broad range of users – from the technology-adept to those who have never touched a tablet before – and also for a whole range of budgets. It’s one thing to create a vital bit of kit, it’s another to do it at a price that all seniors can afford.

Older adults are typically as seen as technophobes, uninterested in technology and unable to work all but the simplest interfaces. However, that picture is rapidly becoming outdated: one in five people aged over 75 use a smartphone, and almost half are internet users.

Questions of digital exclusion are valid for the oldest members of today’s society, but for the seniors of tomorrow, used to a range of technologies for work and at home, it’s likely to be a different story. Technology really could be the key to a more interesting, more comfortable old age.

Future tech usually carries connotations of exciting but ultimately over-hyped technologies. With little to no practical uses in business, sudden crazes for things like blockchain and other future tech have quickly died off.

Tech like 3D printers, chatbots, and VR, which had their heyday come and go, are now relegated to the same category of interesting, useless technology.

However, COVID-19 has raised challenges that no one expected, calling for innovative solutions. We’ve compiled six ways that future tech has been used - effectively, and not so effectively - to help address problems caused by coronavirus.

3D printers

3D printing went through a bout of popularity around 2014, but companies promised more than the technology could deliver to both the business and everyday consumer. The technology everyone hoped would revolutionise manufacturing, though it continues to evolve and add new materials, never took hold in home manufacturing.

But 3D printing stepped into the spotlight during the pandemic, as it became clear that hospitals around the world weren’t equipped with enough ventilators and PPE to treat the influx of patients and protect hospital staff. So companies started creating 3D-printable designs, helping to fill these gaps in life-saving equipment.

Businesses like 3D Systems, and customers Lonati and Isinnova, have collaborated to print components of ventilators. Through additive manufacturing like 3D printing, companies can manufacture parts internally or make parts as needed, reducing their dependency on suppliers.

“And this is what we’re asking our network, and encouraging the industry to help us do right now,” said Vyomesh Joshi, president and CEO of 3D Systems, in a statement. “Circumvent the supply chain to manufacture these PPE (personal protective equipment) and life-saving devices as quickly as possible.”

It also enables creativity. 3D Systems helped print hundreds of valves for an emergency ventilator mask designed by an Italian doctor, Renato Favero, who modified snorkelling masks donated by the sports equipment retailer Decathlon. Plenty of others in the 3D-printing industry have also stepped up, meaning that we’ve finally found a use for 3D printers: saving lives.

Drones

British police have shelled out millions for drones, and are now finding out ways to put the whirring toys to use to support their work. Derbyshire Police, for example, has used its drone with a thermal camera to look for homes growing marijuana, as well as to search spaces that were deemed unsafe for officers, including abandoned buildings.

Now the drone has a new use: nagging dog walkers to leave national parks and go back to their homes. Derbyshire Police used drone footage to make a short clip of people walking in Curbar Edge in the Peak District, hoping to encourage others to stay at home as advised by the government and saying “the message is still not getting through”. The move was criticised as “sinister” by digital rights group Big Brother Watch, and partially led to new guidance about how police should enforce the lockdown laws, but at least the drones aren’t gathering dust.

Virtual reality

VR has struggled to find purpose with mainstream audiences, with headsets failing to take off despite the best efforts of Oculus and HTC. However, researchers at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC have put the neglected tech to use to fight COVID-19.

One of the challenges of this pandemic has been treating the patients who are hardest hit by COVID-19 and understanding exactly what’s happening to their lungs. The hospital saw its first COVID-19 patient in mid-March and his condition quickly worsened. To understand why, doctors made a 3D image of his lungs to see the damage in VR. What they saw was alarming – but helped treat the patient.

“There is such a stark contrast between the virus-infected abnormal lung and the more healthy, adjacent lung tissue,” explained Dr Keith Mortman, chief of thoracic surgery at the hospital, in its podcast. “And it’s such a contrast that you do not need an MD after your name to understand these images.” Such is the power of virtual reality – and the damage caused by COVID-19.

Robotics

Medical staff on the front line are dying from infections passed on by their patients. We don’t yet have the robotics in place to help doctors and nurses operate at a distance from those sick with COVID-19, but it’s clear to see how automation could help.

Indeed, there are places where robotics are already helping in the fight against this pandemic. In China, robots were used to deliver meals to people under quarantine in hotels. Meanwhile, in Thailand, hospitals have been rolling out small robots equipped with displays to communicate with patients without risk of infection, as well as dole out food and medicine.

Danish company UVD Robots says that its ultraviolet cleaning robots have been shipped to China, Italy and elsewhere to zap viruses with light to help stop the spread of infections. “We are now helping solve one of the biggest problems of our time, preventing the spread of bacteria and viruses with a robot that saves lives in hospitals every day,” said Claus Risager, UVD Robots chairman, in a statement. It’s a clear example of how robotics can actually support human workers, rather than replacing jobs as so many fear.

AI and algorithms

There’s no question that artificial intelligence and algorithms have already had an impact on our lives – but they could save them too. These technologies are being used in a wide range of ways to help battle the novel coronavirus, from tracking cases to smart symptom checkers.

Doctorlink is one example. This online symptom checker’s algorithm was updated to include details about COVID-19 to help people understand whether they’re at risk from the disease and what steps to take next – and to reassure the “worried well” that they’re fine and should simply stay home.

“The symptom assessment app was first updated to detect potential cases of COVID-19 in January and is updated daily to reflect new guidance on the novel coronavirus from NHS England, Public Health England and the UK government,” said Rupert Spiegelberg, CEO of Doctorlink. “The latest release, which is available to the million patients across England, includes new logic to identify patients who are vulnerable due to their age or underlying health conditions and provide them with appropriate advice.”

AI is also being used to track the spread of the pandemic – including using our smartphone data for contact tracing – and to develop medicines, with British startup BenevolentAI using its predictive system to analyse already approved pharmaceuticals for their ability to help treat COVID-19.

Chatbots

Chatbots are stupid. You ask them a question and they can only answer if they figure out what you’re trying to say – and if they have that answer preprogrammed into them. But the World Health Organization (WHO) has found a use for the most basic of future technologies: fighting global misinformation about the pandemic.

The chatbot is available in messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Viber, making it easy to fact-check information forwarded by family and friends. To access the chatbot on WhatsApp, send a message saying “hi” to +41797818791. You’ll then get access to a menu of options, including the latest figures, how to protect yourself, travel advice and fact checking, as well as a question and answer service.

“The WHO aims to reach as many people as possible with reliable health information through innovative digital technology,” said WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “Information is power and can help save lives during this pandemic.” A life-saving chatbot? Who would have thought

After years of shrill reports predicting that automation would steal our jobs, those people working on the front lines of health, retail and transport during the pandemic could be forgiven for wishing they had a bit of machine help – or that their risky roles could be totally replaced by robots.

Robots have played a small role in battling the pandemic. There are stories of delivery robots doling out dinner to those under quarantine in China and telepresence robots interacting with patients in the US. In the Netherlands, one firm is pushing UV light robots as a way to clean hospitals. “That, to me, is very simple and easy to achieve in terms of robotics technology,” said Dr Ali Shafti, a research associate in the Brain and Behaviour Lab at Imperial College London.

But for the most part, across the UK and elsewhere, deliveries are done by couriers, treatment hand-delivered by nurses and doctors, and cleaning by janitors – all of whom are left at risk of contracting Covid-19. We’ve been promised driverless cars for years, yet dozens of bus drivers have died in London from the disease. Why were robotics and automation not ready in time for this outbreak?

According to a group of researchers in Science Robotics, the failure to achieve adequate automation to assist during the Covid-19 pandemic is down to a lack of funding and research focus. “The experiences with the Ebola outbreak [in 2015] identified a broad spectrum of use cases, but funding for multidisciplinary research, in partnership with agencies and industry, to meet these use cases remains expensive, rare and directed to other applications,” the researchers wrote. “Without a sustainable approach to research, history will repeat itself, and robots will not be ready for the next incident.”

Snap to attention

There have been some success stories with medical robots. In the UK, NHS hospitals have long used robotics to aid surgeries, notably the da Vinci models and CMR Surgical’s Versius, both of which are still controlled by doctors. Some UK hospitals have also trialled the use of tablet-dispensing robots, porter droids to ferry about supplies and those clever UV-light cleaning bots.

Other ideas in use around the world include robotic ultrasound machines, which reduce the number of staff that are required for key diagnostic tests, exoskeletons for rehabilitation support and fluffy seal-like robots for socialisation. In Japanese hospitals, the Pepper humanoid robot is used to interact with patients, in particular to help reduce anxiety in children, while a lab has built a robotic bear to help lift patients, easing carers’ workloads. Those ideas sound impressive, but their use is sporadic and largely limited to trials.

However, the technology is ready to go, explained Shafti. “The type of research being conducted right now in academia and in industry on robotics is well developed enough to be used in actual social care and healthcare,” he said. “And some of it is being used – but there is little effort on collaborative, multidisciplinary work aimed at actually getting [robots] in use. I personally believe there are many very good research projects working on great technology, but they’ve missed that last step of actually getting it out there and making use of it.”

To do that, the academics, startups and tech companies developing such ideas need more support from the government and health services, he adds. As social distancing looks likely to become the norm for months if not years, we need new ways to deliver healthcare safely. “That’s something robotics could really help with,” Shafti said. “It’s something we’re missing out on right now.”

With budget cuts and staff shortages, we shouldn’t need a pandemic to bring more robotics to the frontline of health. “I think all of this should have been deployed before any crisis was going on,” Shafti said, but adds that it’s understandable that the focus of the NHS has been elsewhere. “There are so many core issues within social and healthcare that moving to advanced technology becomes a later priority.”

Robotics company Boston Dynamics has launched online sales for Spot, its dog-like robot able to climb stairs and traverse rough terrain.

This debut marks the first time that businesses can purchase a Boston Dynamics robot and the company’s first online sales offering. Spot will set businesses back $74,500.

Spot can perform a broad range of tasks and owners can reconfigure it to fit their needs. From increasing efficiency to reducing safety risks in the workplace, Spot’s platform is easily configurable. It also offers a number of accessories and add-ons for further customization.

Spot was previously only available for short-term lease under Boston Dynamics’ early adopter program. Under the program, over 150 Spot robots helped companies document construction progress, monitor environments and provide situational awareness.

In the early adopter program, results included:

• Approximately 20 hours of work saved per week by automating the weekly capture of 5,000 images on Quebec-based construction firm Pomerleau’s building project.
• Increased efficiency in data-collection and safety at Hensel Phelps’ construction of Denver International Airport’s main terminal.
• Reduced human risk in dangerous tasks for AkerBP’s energy-production facilities by using computer-vision-based anomaly-detection software.
• Autonomously navigating underground terrain with NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Team CoSTAR’s integrated autonomy, perception and communication tools. This application won the most recent DARPA Subterranean Challenge Competition, the Urban Circuit.

Marc Raibert, chairman and founder of Boston Dynamics, said: “At Boston Dynamics, we have spent decades creating and refining robots with advanced mobility, dexterity and intelligence because we believe agile robots can solve a broad range of real-world problems.”

“The combination of Spot’s sophisticated software and high performance mechanical design enables the robot to augment difficult or dangerous human work. Now you can use Spot to increase human safety in environments and tasks where traditional automation hasn’t been successful,” Raibert continued.

Spot is intended for commercial and industrial use only and is currently available for purchase in the US. Boston Dynamics will continue to lease Spot to customers in select international markets.

This article originally appeared in February's edition of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here.

56 years after it held its first Olympic Games, Tokyo will – hopefully – play host for the second time, from 24 July to 9 August 2020.

The Games in 1964 sparked a number of technological feats for the Japanese capital. It was the first major sporting event broadcast via satellite, computers were used for the first time at an Olympics and state-of-the-art timing solutions were adopted, enabling competitors to be tracked to one-hundredth of a second.

The 2020 edition promises to be just as ground-breaking. Tokyo 2020 organisers are working together with a number of key delivery partners, including Japanese automaker Toyota, which will be delivering over 3,700 sustainable mobility solutions including 500 of its hydrogen-powered Mirai sedans, which will ferry officials between venues. The firm’s hydrogen fuel cell bus, named Sora, will shuttle visitors while behind the scenes, fuel cell forklifts will help keep things moving.

Toyota has also developed a product expressly designed for use at the Games – the Accessible People Mover (APM). The low-speed, short distance battery electric vehicle is a last-mile transport solution. Approximately 200 APMs will be in use at Tokyo 2020.

“90% of Toyota vehicles at Tokyo 2020 will be electric,” says David Rogers, a spokesperson for Toyota's Olympics partnership. “With this in mind, Tokyo 2020 will not just be the most technologically advanced and innovative Games, but it will be the cleanest too.”

Toyota will also provide the latest in robot technology to assist with specific mobility needs. For example, Human Support Robots and Delivery Support Robots will aid over 1,000 spectators using wheelchairs at the Olympic Stadium by carrying food and other goods, guiding people to their seats and providing event information.

Toyota has also developed mascot robots, which will welcome athletes and guests at various Games-related locations with human-like movements such as shaking hands and waving, as well as using a variety of facial expressions. Cameras mounted on the robots’ foreheads will allow them to recognise when people are nearby and to react to them. The Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee and Toyota are also discussing a number of ways for the mascot robots to make it easier and more enjoyable for children to experience the Games.

“An attempt to use robots was made at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympic Games [in South Korea],” says Masa Takaya, Tokyo 2020 Spokesperson from The Tokyo Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. “However, we believe that Tokyo 2020 is the first time in Olympic history that robots will be put to practical use, helping to manage events and providing service at spectator seats.

“The initiative of having robots facilitate remote participation in the Games by those not at competition venues will also be an Olympic first, and could herald a new approach to sporting events, allowing those who are physically unable to attend events participate from anywhere.”

Meanwhile, Power Assist Suits developed by Panasonic will be used in the backstage areas of venues and at the Athletes’ Villages to unload and transport heavy objects, including food and drinks, and for waste disposal. The suits, which were originally designed to support personnel who frequently handle heavy loads, including at airports, factories and construction, feature built-in sensors that detect limb movements. These transmit information almost instantly to synchronised motors, providing wearers with mechanised power for performing strenuous tasks easily and safely.

Cutting-edge information communication technology, cyber security solutions, automatic multilingual translation and visitor guidance using digital signage will also feature heavily at the Games, as will the use of 3D technology, which will provide spectators with multiple viewing angles.

“3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT) is a first-of-its-kind computer vision solution using artificial intelligence to enhance the viewing experience for Olympic fans with near real-time insights and overlay visualisations during athletic events,” Rick Echevarria, vice president and general manager of the Intel Olympic Program, tells IT Pro. “3DAT was developed by Intel and is hosted on Intel-based data centres in Alibaba’s cloud infrastructure. In partnership with Olympic Broadcast Services, it uses four pan-tilt mounted, highly mobile cameras to capture video for analysis.”

Intel’s virtual reality (VR) training will be used to create an immersive learning experience for key managers at competition venues, bringing a number of benefits including lower costs and increased training efficiency. “The training will also include the use of digital twins that can open several opportunities to unleash the power of data for training, planning, simulation and more,” said Echevarria.

Fans can also benefit from Intel’s VR solutions. Intel True VR will be deployed in a range of sports venues for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games including the opening and closing ceremonies, track and field, gymnastics, boxing and beach volleyball.

Technology is also helping to make the Games a safe place to be. “Panasonic’s facial recognition gate has been chosen by the Immigration Bureau of the Ministry of Justice to streamline immigration procedures at Tokyo International Airport’s immigration control,” says Masanori Matsushita, Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic enterprise division manager for Panasonic. Without the need for prior registration of biometric data, the system compares photographic data of the traveller’s face in the integrated circuit chip embedded in the person’s passport. A photo taken at the facial recognition gate will verify their identity.

Meanwhile, to prevent visitors suffering from heatstroke, Panasonic has installed its Green Air Conditioner across various Tokyo venues. The solution sprays a fine mist comprised of microscopic water particles. Before these particles evaporate, they absorb the heat and thereby lower the temperature. Additionally, when these particles attach to skin they rapidly evaporate, removing heat and helping people cool down.

According to Takaya, the sum of all of these innovations is a Games unlike any other. “We expect the Tokyo 2020 Games to be the most innovative in history,” he says. “It will be the perfect opportunity to promote technological innovation in Japan.”

The tiny but potent PC that is the Raspberry Pi can be built into all manner of amazing projects, but this is arguably one of the most impressive tricks - creating a working robot.

Of course, building a Pi-powered robot can take many forms. There are ready-made kits that add a robot arm to your Pi for just a few pounds, cheap and cheerful 'mouse' style chassis that simplify the build, and highly technical professional creations that can operate in the harshest environments around. One team created the PiTank (including a functioning ping-pong ball cannon), while another team of scientists investigating volcanoes used a Pi-powered robot to investigate and map active fissures - the only limit is your imagination!

To build a robot buggy, you'll need the following components - as mentioned, you can shortcut the process by buying a kit, but we'll deal with the individual component parts here. We're also going to assume you've got a working Pi with Raspbian installed, have updated it and can either connect to a monitor or SSH into it to write and run scripts.

For a basic buggy you'll need the following tools and components:

• Raspberry Pi
• Motor controller board (L298N Dual H Bridge DC Stepper Motor Driver Controller Board)
• 2 12V DC motors
• 2 wheels
• 1 AA battery holder
• 4 AA batteries
• Ball caster
• Wire or jumper leads
• USB power bank
• Screw driver
• Soldering iron
• Breadboard
• VL53L0X time-of-flight range finder or ultrasonic distance sensor (optional)
• 2 line following sensors (optional)

First up, solder wires to the motor terminals, then attach the other ends to the motor controller board. If you're using the popular L298N Dual H Bridge DC Stepper Motor Driver Controller Board, then that'll be OUT1, OUT2, OUT3, and OUT4.

Next you'll need power for the motors, so take the AA battery holder and insert the red wire into the VCC terminal block. The black wire goes into the GND block. It is important that you get this the correct way around.

Some boards fit directly onto the GPIO pins, such as the popular Explorer HAT, but this one needs to be wired in as follows:

Now you'll have the basics of a working robot, but one last vital logistical question is which is your left motor and which is your right motor. You also need to know which way they are driving to go forward, and which way they are driving to go backwards.

Label the motors with 'L' and 'R' with a marker pen, and add a forward arrow. Now it's time to write a test script:

Open a Python shell by clicking Menu > Programming > Python 3 (IDLE). Then click File > New File to open an empty script and enter the following commands:

from gpiozero import Robotrobby = Robot(left = (7, 8), right = (9, 10))

Save your file and call it robby.py or similar. You can then run it by pressing F5 on your keyboard.

Now switch over to the shell and type the following to observe which way the motors turn.

robby.forward(0.4)robby.right(0.4)

If the right motor spins, you're good; if not you'll need to swap them round by swapping the pin numbers in your original script:

robby = Robot(left = (9, 10), right = (7, 8))

Next check your motors are both turning the right direction:

robby.forward(0.4)

If the motors are both turning clockwise you're good - if not you'll need to adjust the pins in the initial script again, for example:

robby = Robot(left = (9, 10), right = (8, 7))

Now we're ready to put the bot together - there's many ways to construct a chassis, from 3D printing to laser cutting, but first it's best to use a cardboard box to get the hang of the layout. Experts recommend a chocolate box because the card is nice and rigid, but the choices are endless!

The chassis needs to contain the Raspberry Pi, motor controller and batteries, and needs to allow a pair of wheels to be mounted. Cardboard also allows you to experiment with fitting sensors later on, such as a couple of line sensors, and an ultrasonic distance sensor or a lidar sensor.

You'll essentially end up with a motor on each side at one end of the box, attached to an external wheel, and the ball caster at the front. Locate your USB power bank in the box, along with the Pi, controller board and motor battery pack.

You should now be able to boot your Pi (from the USB pack) and begin to program it.

There are five basic commands to move your robot, that can be combined to make it move in different ways:

robot.forward()robot.backward()robot.right()robot.left()robot.stop()

For example, here's a simple script to make it go in a square shape (although you may need to tweak the sleep functions to get the motions correct).

from gpiozero import Robotrobot = Robot(left = (7, 8), right = (9, 10))while True:robot.forward()sleep(3)robot.stop()robot.right()sleep(1)robot.stop()

Now you can experiment with your bot, working your way up from following simple shapes to navigating complex mazes, and adding arrays of sensors - enjoy!

Thanks to the Raspberry Pi foundation for the official Robot buggy project.

Back in 2015, more than 1,000 academics sent an open letter calling for a ban on "offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control." A ban has yet to materialise, so just as "Do They Know It's Christmas?" gets sporadically covered every few years, another open letter has gone out to tie in with UN talks to discuss the future of autonomous weapons.

It's shorter, and there are fewer signatories perhaps because of the time pressures involved for publication to match the UN's own schedules, or perhaps because getting the talks started in the first place was seen as victory enough for many academics. Either way, there are 116 signatories from 26 countries this time, once again including Tesla founder Elon Musk (who is outspoken on the potential dangers of AI) and Google DeepMind's Mustafa Suleyman both veterans of the last letter.

While the 2015 original letter calls for an outright ban on autonomous weapons, the new letter stops short, leaving a lot to the imagination. "We do not have long to act," the letter reads. "Once this Pandora's box is opened, it will be hard to close. We, therefore, implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers." Though it's hard to think of a way of protecting us from the dangers of autonomous weapons that doesn't involve an outright ban, it's slightly odd the letter doesn't explicitly call for one.

The 123 nations that make up the international convention on conventional weapons voted to formally discuss the issue of autonomous weapons last December, although the British government has previously been resistant to the idea of a complete ban, stating as recently as 2015 that "we do not see the need for a prohibition on the use of Laws, as international humanitarian law already provides sufficient regulation for this area."

There are very few parallel universes where such a justification would be classed as "reassuring", but there we are. The debate is pushing onward, and the robotics experts will hope that their views are taken on board otherwise, they'll likely be contributing to the "third revolution of warfare" whether they like it or not.

The letter is published in full below.

Main image credit: Bigstock

For better or worse, artificial intelligence is the buzzword of 2017.

Look in any direction and you'll find tech billionaires warning of its potential to enslave humanity, the inventor of the world wide web calling for universal basic income to compensate the newly unemployed as AI takes their jobs, and more tech billionaires urging us to merge with machines so we can keep those jobs.

All of this might one day prove true, but it doesn't help you build a chatbot for out-of-hours customer enquiries by Q4.

Look behind the headlines, though, and AI is actually useful or nearly useful in a variety of areas that could help your business run better, taking care of monotonous tasks to free staff to work more imaginatively.

While perhaps our future robot overlords might look back on these early AI innovations as we do on cyanobacteria, at least they can prove useful to us in the meantime.

Is AI the preserve of the tech giants?

"At present we're too small to do something about AI," admits Michael Enk, group CIO of Swedish publisher Aller Media. "We're reviewing different perspectives we looked a bit at IBM Watson, we looked a bit at Amelia from IPsoft and other tools as well but they're still in a price range where it's difficult to actually find the business value on it."

Most AI innovation is coming from companies with the funds to engage in a lot of R&D, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, whose systems benefit from their huge cloud infrastructures and billions of pounds of investment.

Liam Quinn, IT director at events management firm Richmond Events, wants an AI system capable of matching conference attendees better with fellow delegates and vendors running stalls. But outside of the big companies, he has been hard pressed to find firms capable of doing it.

"People are talking about it but they aren't there yet," he says. "I anticipate it may take six to eight months to find someone who can help us. Understanding what they actually do versus what they say they are doing is key.

"We will run 48 events this year, so this needs to work at every market and every questionnaire."

But that's not to say it's impossible he believes that while the big companies may dominate AI, there's room for plenty of smaller vendors to sit their applications on top of the larger ones.

"Maybe where you need to be is the broker in the middle to allow the end user to make use of the performance and infrastructure behind it," he explains.

Where is AI practical today?

Quinn does see some uses for AI that could be useful now, especially with the research the big companies have put into speech recognition and natural language capabilities.

"The whole use of chatbots for doing business support for end users, asking 'how do I do this or that at your events', I can certainly see that becoming more and more prolific in our environment," he says.

Gary O'Connor, CTO at parcel delivery firm Doddle, identifies customer service as another area in which AI could currently make a difference.

"[You could] do some pieces around 'where is my parcel', simplify the flow, maybe there's some options there," he explains. "Not necessarily the whole order process, but aspects of the order sitting inside some of those common messaging channels is something that will come."

He adds: "We see AI at the moment as a way of providing the right additional information such that we can maximise the benefit of a person's time on the end of it. When a query lands with someone in a customer call centre, they've got as much information in their hands to resolve that query as quickly as possible."

Enk doesn't see AI as viable today rather, he sees value in robotics (automated processes) right now.

"Finance is a good example of where we're looking at using robotics for accounts payable," he says. "They're very standardised and easy to see and it could increase the quality of output and help us put our workforce to better use than today where they have to do these tasks manually."

The next 10 years and beyond

While Enk doesn't see AI as immediately useful for his company, he believes it will be by 2020.

"We'll have bots, we'll have AIs, we'll be an organisation that enables business through taking all sorts of standardised applications and putting them together and making a solution," he says.

"The old legacy building [of applications] is going away very rapidly, but AI and bots will be present in 2020."

By 2025, he sees AI and humans working side by side. "I'm not certain we'll see a difference or understand what the difference is [between them and people]. With the pace [of change] we're seeing on speech recognition and voice, it will be very difficult to distinguish between human and machine talking, for instance."

This raises the spectre of AI taking human jobs, with Gartner pointing out that not just blue collar, but fairly highly skilled jobs are at risk of automation, saying it's CIOs' job to make everybody work peacefully together.

But while the future's uncertain, O'Connor is optimistic. "[It will] take a bit of drudgery out of people's lives and allow us to focus on slightly more interesting things," he says. "In a similar way to [what happened in] manufacturing, is it globalisation that takes jobs, or automation or a bit of both? That picture is complicated but I hope we end up in a world where technology gives us all a bit more time to do more interesting things."

Richmond Events' Quinn is pragmatic, saying: "In the end what will happen is what always happens: the jobs we have today aren't the jobs we will have in the future, but we will have different jobs."

AI working alongside humans could even help IT, he contends, saying it could take care of backend code, allowing coders to focus on frontend development.

"That would make IT much more responsive to these changing needs," he says. "You can focus on the interesting part of the job then when you have worked out what you want to do, then you programme the bot to do the stuff you can't be bothered to do."

If you're a senior IT decision-maker and you'd like to apply to be part of the IT Pro Panel, please email panel@itpro.co.uk.

Google's parent company Alphabet has sold robotics subsidiaries Boston Dynamics and SCHAFT to Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank, the company has announced.

"Today, there are many issues we still cannot solve by ourselves with human capabilities," said founder and CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son. "Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots.

"I am thrilled to welcome them to the SoftBank family and look forward to supporting them as they continue to advance the field of robotics and explore applications that can help make life easier, safer and more fulfilling."

Boston Dynamics, which designs and manufactures humanoid and bipedal robots, has been up for sale for more than a year according to reports, after consistently struggling to translate its innovations into commercial revenue.

Much less is known about SCHAFT, a secretive robotics firm that was acquired by Google in 2013. The company was originally Japanese, and has previously entered robots into the DARPA Robotics Challenge alongside Boston Dynamics but little else is public knowledge.

SoftBank, on the other hand, already has a foothold in consumer robotics. The company's robot Pepper, which acts a personal companion for home and business users, has been a big hit in Japan.

The news was apparently popular with SoftBank's investors, who propelled the company's shares to the highest level they've reached in almost 20 years. The terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed.

SoftBank has been on something of an acquisition spree recently, snapping up UK chip manufacturer ARM for 24 billion just under a year ago. Son has been steadily building the company - which started as a telco - into a huge multinational. This has partly been accomplished through smart plays like an early investment in Jack Ma's e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Investment in 5G, robotics and expanding fibre networks underpinned the government's technology promises in yesterday's Spring Budget 2017 as it tries to prepare the UK for a post-Brexit landscape.

Chancellor Philip Hammond outlined a 270 million investment spread across driverless cars, robotics and biotech, as well as a 16 million 5G fund and 200 million for councils to try out projects to roll out full-fibre broadband networks.

One central aim of the budget was to "invest in cutting-edge technology and innovation, so Britain continues to be at the forefront of the global technology revolution", according to the government, as it seeks to stabilise Britain's finances ahead of a potentially rocky exit from the EU.

Charlotte Holloway, policy director at trade industry body techUK, said: "Today's Budget shows a consistent approach from the Chancellor, laying solid foundations for what will be an uncertain period ahead. The digital sector is the fastest-growing part of the UK economy and today's Budget will provide tech companies with reassurance that the Chancellor understands that their success is critical for a truly Global Britain."

Welcoming the investments in 5G, driverless cars, robotics and broadband, she also lauded a 40 million budget for the Department for Education to try different approaches to retrain people throughout their working lives, after a Parliamentary committee called on Whitehall to upskill those who face losing their jobs to AI in the future.

A 300 million pot to support 1,000 new STEM PhD places and fellowships will also be created, while T-Levels will be introduced from 2019-2020 for 16-19-year-olds to enter technical training.

The cash for much of the technology investment comes from the 23 billion National Productivity Investment Fund created in last year's Autumn Statement.

5G

Ofcom wants 5G technology to arrive in the UK by 2020, but there are still no firm plans for what spectrum it will utilise and trials won't take place until 2018 at the earliest.

Nevertheless, the government plans to fund a National 5G Innovation Network that can trial and demonstrate 5G applications and establish a "centre of 5G expertise" within government to oversee this with private sector partners.

O2 COO Derek McManus welcomed the 5G investment, but said a spectrum cap of 35% is necessary to keep 5G networks competitive. "The 5G strategy sets out a clear plan which will help secure the UK's status as a leading digital economy, but a competitive framework must be in place to ensure the 5G network is up to scratch," he said. "A competitive auction will allow the mobile industry to successfully evolve towards 5G, laying the foundation for a prosperous digital future for UK consumers and businesses."

Broadband

With 200 million funding, the government hopes to group demand from schools, hospitals and other public bodies to make it more attractive for telcos to invest in rural broadband roll outs.

The cash will support a 400 million Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund that will be matched by private sector investmen, which will be launched in spring 2017.

Rufus Grig, chief technology and strategy officer at telecoms firm Maintel, argued that the investment doesn't go far enough, saying it's crucial small businesses get better connections as they rely on data more and more.

"Philip Hammond's proposed investment in rural broadband is a huge step forward for all small businesses," he said. "However, it cannot stop there. More must be done to manage networking services for British companies if they are to compete on the global stage and drive our economy forward.

"Real-time traffic on enterprise networks will continue to increase, through voice or video calls, screen-sharing, instant messaging or video casts. These business critical real-time applications, with low tolerance to delays or errors put networks under enormous strain."

Marc Agnew, VP of ViaSat Europe, also said the investment was too small in scope.

"Fibre alone, while offering hyper-fast speeds in the right circumstances, will never reach every household without being prohibitively expensive," Agnew said.

"The UK is at serious risk of ending up with a two-tier internet; where those areas with fast services reap the benefits in terms of education, opportunity and investment, while those without broadband are left further behind," he added.

Automation and skills

As the UK pushes more investment into cutting-edge technologies like driverless cars and robotics, several observers noted that a focus on skills is necessary to ensure humans keep up with a changing technological landscape.

Chris Francis, SAP's UK director of government relations, said: "We can only continue to drive innovation if we have the skills fit for the digital economy. The Chancellor's budget rightly places digital skills training at the centre of the commitment to securing the UK's economic future. We support efforts to reinvigorate technical education within our schools and universities as well as its plans to collaborate with businesses like SAP on digital skills training initiatives.

"However it's equally important to support the contribution of business to the wider digital and business skills agenda and lifelong learning, ensuring we have flexibility to meet our employees', partners' and the community's needs, not a one size fits all approach."

He also welcomed yesterday's insight into what the 23 billion National Productivity Investment Fund will be spent on transport networks, better digital infrastructure, 250 million on STEM PhD fellowships and building a talent pipeline from abroad.

That funding is in addition to last week's Digital Strategy, which set out a variety of private sector-led initiatives to improve people's digital skills.

Francis added: "We also welcome the government's commitment to supporting disruptive technologies such as biotech, robotics and automation through its 270m investment, but it's essential the ambition to harness innovation is matched by outcome-orientated action.

"We'd like to see more from the government, especially using public procurement and other industry-government touch points, on stimulating demand side digital investment across all sectors of the economy to help address our productivity challenge in the short and medium term whilst we await the results of the longer term investments."

James Smith, MD of tech recruiter Networkers, said: "The skills gap in the technology sector is well documented, and the industry and government desperately need to address this to ensure UK businesses are fit for the future."

Networkers' head of data science and AI, Chris Rosebert, added: "Without doubt AI and robotics are providing the biggest technology leap that we have seen in a very long time and will affect every business and individual.The fight for skilled professionals is intense and tech hubs like Berlin and Barcelona are becoming increasingly attractive to UK-based candidates."

Boston Dynamics has unofficially unveiled a robot that it describes as 'nightmare-inducing' thanks to its leg and wheel combination.

Handle, as the unit is apparently called, is a cross between a Segway and the Atlas Robot, but the combination of wheels at the bottom of the legs make it more manoeuvrable. It also has two arms, although they weren't shown in use.

Boston Dynamics' founder, Marc Raibert, revealed the robot at the company's investor presentation and although it hasn't been officially announced, a video shown to those in attendance certainly does look a little scary. He introduced the video as "the debut presentation of what I think will be a nightmare-inducing robot".

Raibert said it's an "experiment in combining wheels with legs, with a very dynamic system that is balancing itself all the time and has a lot of knowledge of how to throw its weight around".

The wheels are more efficient for getting around compared to legs, meaning it can move faster, but the limbs make it more human-like, which is the part Boston Dynamics expects to scare people. The company explained Handle could be used in warehouses, zooming around and collecting items for shipments or delivering goods to a production line, for example.

The video was uploaded to YouTube by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson who was watching the presentation with other investors. However, shortly after adding the video to the video streaming site, Jurvetson was asked to blur it out by Boston Dynamics. He did comply, but not before the web had transformed the video into animated gifs for all to see.

Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google's parent company, Alphabet in December 2013 when it was still operating under the Google name and although it tried to sell the company last year, with potential purchases rumoured as Toyota and Amazon, it would seem nothing came of it and Boston Dynamics is still innovating with new robotic ideas within Alphabet.

Main image credit: Boston Dynamics

The government has pledged to better support the UK's robotics and AI industry and will invest an additional 4.7 billion by 2020 in R&D - the biggest increase from any Parliament since 1979.

The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund will also help the UK capitalise on its strengths in science and innovation such as robotics, adding another avenue for innovators to be awarded funding to help the UK become more competitive in the sector.

"We have often been slower than competitors to take up and deploy existing technologies: for example, the UK makes less use of robotics and automation than most other countries in Western Europe," the report explained.

Prime Minister Theresa May explained the government's Modern Industrial Strategy is a critical part of the UK's plan for post-Brexit Britain.

"As we leave the EU, it will help us grasp the bigger prize: the chance to build that stronger, fairer Britain that stands tall in the world and is set up to succeed in the long-term," she said."And it is a vital step toward building a country where prosperity is shared, and there is a genuine opportunity for all."

The Industrial Strategy also addressed the skills gap and pledges to ensure everyone has the basic skills needed in a modern economy through introducing technical education to help those who decide not to go to university. This will be implemented via 170 million freed up by local authorities to launch new "Institutes of Technology."

The government will also introduce STEM and digital skills and numeracy education for everyone, raising skill levels in lagging areas. MOD apprenticeships will be used as a launchpad to fill the skills gap via on-the-job training.

"The programme has a particular focus on STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths), as well as entrepreneurial skills," the report said. "A team has been established in MoD to develop a joint apprenticeship scheme with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) by April 2017."

A Dutch robotics team has taken home first place in Amazon's Picking Challenge, designed to test robots for industrial warehouse automation.

Team Delft, which includes engineers from Delft University of Technology and a private robotics firm, walked away with a $50,000 (37,695) cash prize after beating out 15 other teams from the US and Japan.

The contest, now in its second year, is split into two sections: a 'pick' task and a 'stow' task. For the 'stow' test, the robots had to load 12 items from a box into specific areas of a shelf.

The 'pick' test, however, was more difficult, with 12 objects to be identified, picked up and packed into boxes. The items all varied in size, shape and weight, and were surrounded and often obscured by other items on the shelf.

Each robot had to perform its tasks autonomously, with the teams given basic details of the objects and movement instructions just five minutes before the start of the test.

The teams lost points for any items that were damaged or dropped from a height of more than 30cm, as well as for leaving an object more than 0.5cm outside its designated shelf area.

Delft's robot comfortably won the 'stow' task with 214 points, and while it tied with Japanese rivals on the 'pick' task, its faster completion time led it to victory.

The win could have significant implications for the manufacturing sector. While automated robots are currently in use by many firms, current models are only capable of reasonably basic, predetermined tasks.

Robots that are able to intelligently identify, manipulate and sort objects would be much more adaptable and multifunctional, speeding up workflows and requiring less human oversight and assistance.

Boston Dynamics, the Alphabet-owned company working on autonomous robotics technology, has unveiled its latest creation.

The company released a YouTube video showing off the SpotMini', a quadruped robot roughly the size of a Labrador. Like the company's other bots, it is self-righting and features a mechanical arm for picking up and manipulating objects.

SpotMini is smaller than many of Boston Dynamics' other robots, weighing just under 25kg. It's also one of the quietest ever produced by the company, as it uses an all-electric system, rather than engines and hydraulics.

In contrast to some of Boston Dynamics' other robodogs', SpotMini appears to be designed for domestic tasks; the video shows it loading a glass into a dishwasher and putting a drinks can in the bin.

This is a departure from previous efforts, many of which have been designed for military applications such as goods and munitions transport. However, it shares certain traits with its heavy-duty cousins, such as the ability to right itself.

The video amusingly shows it slipping on a banana peel as it rounds a corner before using its arm to push itself back onto its feet. It also climbs stairs and crouches to pass under a table, demonstrating its ability to navigate household obstacles.

SpotMini lasts 90 minutes on a single charge, and while it "often uses a human for high-level guidance", the video description states that it can function in an autonomous capacity.

It's currently unclear whether Boston Dynamics is designing SpotMini as an overtly consumer product, but the end of the video could give some clue.

It features a SpotMini bot, but rather than being a bare metal endoskeleton with exposed joints and servos, this one is clad in a pristine, futuristic-looking white shell.

This looks much more like something you might see in a hospital or research lab if not necessarily something you'd take home from PC World.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is rumoured to be selling off robotics division Boston Dynamics because of internal tension and a fear of what people think about robots.

The research arms of Toyota and Amazon are both in the frame as potential buyers of the firm that produces bipedal and quadrupedal military and search-and-rescue robots, which Google bought in 2013, according to Bloomberg.

Two major factors are behind the decision to sell the unit, the publication reported.

One is discontent within Alphabet's overarching robotics division, Replicant (now part of Google X), and the other is a rising concern over the public's perception of advanced robots.

Boston Dynamics executives' reluctance to work with other robot engineers within Replicant lies at the heart of divisions within the group, according to a Bloomberg source.

These tensions came to a head in a November 2015 meeting of the division, the minutes of which, along with a number of subsequent emails, were accidentally published to an internal Alphabet-wide forum and subsequently handed to Bloomberg by an unnamed Google employee.

Jonathan Rosenberg, an advisor to Alphabet CEO Larry Page who chaired the meeting, said Replicant "cannot spend 30-plus per cent of [its] resources on things that take 10 years" and that "there's [a] time frame that we need to be generating an amount of revenue that covers expenses and [that] needs to be a few years".

Aaron Edsinger, director of robotics at Google in San Francisco, meanwhile said he had hit something of a brick wall when trying to work with the Boston Dynamics team on the production of a low-cost robot quadruped.

More recently, Google X, Alphabet's 'moonshot' division, has been trying to distance itself from Boston Dynamics as well, according to additional leaked documents. Indeed, Bloomberg claims that when the rest of Replicant was folded into Google X, Boston Dynamics was put up for sale.

According to the news outlet, when a YouTube video of the division's latest Atlas robot appeared online, Courtney Hohn, a director of communications at Google and a spokeswoman for Google X, asked her colleagues to "distance X from [the] video".

"There's excitement from the tech press, but we're also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans' jobs," Hohne allegedly said.

"We don't want to trigger a whole separate media cycle about where [Boston Dynamics] really is at Google," she reportedly added.

IT Pro has contacted Google for their response to the story, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Around five million jobs could disappear by 2020, as advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and other fields rock businesses worldwide.

Dubbing it the "fourth industrial revolution", the World Economic Forum (WEF) has predicted that developments in technology will "lay the foundation for a revolution more comprehensive and all-encompassing than anything we have ever seen".

The casualties of this revolution will be people whose jobs can be replaced by sufficiently-skilled software and hardware, with financial services the industry most at risk of disruption, while low-skilled workers will face widespread redundancy, according to WEF's The Future of Jobs report.

It warned: "It is simply not possible to weather the current technological revolution by waiting for the next generation's workforce to become better prepared.

"To prevent a worst-case scenariotechnological change accompanied by talent shortages, mass unemployment and growing inequalityreskilling and upskilling of today's workers will be critical."

Overall, 7.1 million jobs will be lost by 2020, WEF estimated, mainly within office and administration roles. While another two million high-skilled jobs will be created, people whose jobs are lost as a result of the revolution will not be able to fill these roles.

While men will lose 2.65 million jobs, and women 2.45 million jobs, men will gain one job for every three jobs lost, compared to one job gained for every five jobs lost for women.

The report read: "The conclusion is clear. If current industry gender gap trends persist women are at risk of losing out on tomorrow's best job opportunities."

It recommended companies should provide more support for women to join the highest ranks, offer better work-life balances, and ensure management policies do not discriminate between genders.

The government has announced it will form a Robotics and Autonomous Systems Leadership Council to boost the UK's capabilities in these areas.

The initiative will foster collaboration between industry leaders, academia and government to take advantage of the growing market. Its role will be to plan and execute the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) strategy, which is predicted to be worth $1.9 to $6.4 trillion worldwide by 2025.

The government predicts the council will increase manufacturing capability in the UK by a fifth and will boost the country's digital and technological skills base. It anticipates particular benefits in the healthcare industry where such tech can be used for diagnostics, robot-assisted surgery and rehabilitation systems.

Business Secretary Vince Cable said: "From driverless cars to life-saving surgery, robotics and autonomous systems are playing an even bigger role in business and our day-to-day lives.

"Our response is clear we are serious about grasping the full potential of this multi-billion pound industry to help drive local and national growth and are putting in place the mechanisms to make this happen."

The news comes after Professor David Lane from Heriot-Watt University and Professor Rob Buckingham at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy approached the Department for Business Innovation and Skills saying action needed to be taken in order to place the UK as a leader in robotics.

The Rt Hon Greg Clark, MP Minister for Universities, Science and Cities said in his response to the professors: "The Government's response to the RAS 2020 strategy represents the commitment towards developing the UK's research and innovation capability in RAS. Through building on these recommendations and consolidating our existing strengths, we will develop a world leading position in RAS."

More than one third of UK jobs could be replaced by technology, automation and robotics in the next 20 years with the biggest losses expected in London, according to research.

Lower-paid jobs are five times more likely to be at risk countrywide, but this rises to eight per cent in London.

The research, which was carried by Deloitte alongside the University of Oxford, exposed most of the jobs that currently require repetitive processing, clerical and support services will be replaced with roles requiring digital, management and creative skills.

"Skilled cities like London are incubators for new ideas and products. With the right policies, London can be at the front-line in developing the next generation of digital technologies," said Carl Benedikt Frey, James Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

"To remain a world leading city, London needs to manage the transition of its workforce into new occupations and industries, as it has done so successfully in the past."

It's not all doom and gloom for the jobs market though. Of the businesses based in London questioned, almost three-quarters (73 per cent) said they plan to increase their headcount in the next five years, with just over half (51 per cent) saying they will increase the headcount by at least 10 per cent.

However, many businesses (84 per cent of those surveyed) think digital is the way to go and, as a result, their employees must learn these skills if they don't already possess them.

Businesses, policy makers and educators need to understand the changes expected and should take action now to ensure under-employment isn't an issue, according to Angus Knowles-Cutler, London senior partner at Deloitte.

"Across the UK, there are reasons to be positive, the economy is recovering and job growth is coming from dynamic businesses, hiring faster than the national average," he said.

"But below the headline numbers things are changing fast, and the challenges, right across the UK, are evident. The likely loss of lower paid jobs is a real concern, and the new skills that employers will need in the future deserves close attention."

Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk has described Artificial Intelligence as a massive threat to national and international security, akin to nuclear war.

Musk told delegates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AeroAstro Centennial Symposium that artificial intelligence was our biggest existential threat' and developing super-smart computers is like 'summoning the devil'.

He said: "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence.

"I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish."

The technology entrepreneur has explained in the past that although he has invested in some AI projects, he's only splashing the cash so he can be kept in the loop about what's being developed rather than using it to get a return on the money he's spent.

One of Musk's biggest investments is into developing Vicarious' life-like robot that can think as a human thinks and features a neural network said to replicate brain activites to control vision, body movement and language. Other funders of the project include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher.

"With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it's like yeah, he's sure he can control the demon. Doesn't work out," he explained.

Musk may have a very big battle to stop project becoming too intelligent though. In July, the UK government announced it was investing 150m to develop the UK robotics industry and Google invested in Silicon Valley start-up Savioke to improve the use of robotics in the service industry.

An Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to build a "family" robot has smashed its target in 24 hours.

Jibo is the brainchild of MIT Professor, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal. At 11in in size, the personal assistant aims to replicate the experience of lovable robot sidekicks, which have appeared in popular science fiction films and TV shows for decades.

To take the project beyond the prototype stage, the professor and her team requested $100,000 in backing. So far the project has raised over $346,000, with just under a month left.

Jibo's initial set of skills will include the ability to track faces, allowing him to take pictures and be used for video calling. He will be able to read out messages and reminders, and also tell interactive stories to children.

Running on the Linux platform, Jibo's subsystem will initially remain proprietary, but the software on top will be open sourced. The developer community is being actively encouraged to increase Jibo's skill set and and his functionality should be enhanced by the time he ships to the public in late-2015.

At this time there are no plans to make a version of Jibo which is able to move independently. Instead users will be encouraged to place him in areas like the family room or kitchen where he can be of most assistance.

The retail version of Jibo is priced at $499. A developer package costs $599, includes a full SDK and access to the Jibo developer program.

Full specifications

Size: 11in tall, 6in base

Weight: 2.72kg (6lbs)

Material: Aluminium, ABS plastic, glass

Sensors: 2 colour stereo cameras, 360 sound localisation, full body touch sensors

Movement: 3 full-revolute axes

Display: HD LCD touchscreen

Sound: 2 premium speakers

Lighting: Full-spectrum ambient LED

Language: US English

Power: AC adapter or 30 mins on battery

Connectivity: Wi-Fi & Bluetooth

Platform: Embedded Linux-based

Processor: High-end ARM-based mobile

The Government is investing a substantial amount of money into ensuring the UK robotics industry keeps pace with the rest of the globe.

A proposal by the Technology Strategy Board apes the "Grand Challenges" US policy of the 1980s, which saw researchers aiming towards a goal 10 or 20 years in the future.

The UK's goal will be the creation of successful autonomous robots able to complete specific tasks rather than models that are designed as an "all-in-one" solution.

Test models could be sent to clear up abandoned mines and decommissioned nuclear testing sites in order to evaluate their effectiveness.

The Technology Strategy Board has been granted 400 million in funds for the next year, 150 million of which will be invested into robotics and autonomous systems.

Seeing the UK take the lead in world robot innovation will be one of the project's main aims, and the country's robotics centres in Bristol and Edinburgh will receive more funding as part of it.

Germany, Japan, Korea and the US are the most dominant forces in the RAS market, which is predicted to be worth around 70bn by 2025. The UK is already leading in other types of technology, including driverless cars, repair robots and assistance mechanisms.

However, a change of strategy is needed, according to Professor David Lane of Heriot-Watt University, to create a business environment that would commercialise robot technology before other nations.

"We need to provide a business environment in the UK that is geared towards helping robotic and autonomous technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace," he said. "The UK has an exceptional heritage in many of the industries where robotics can be most useful."

Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield told the BBC that the new plan was "great news".

"The UK is the lowest user of industrial robotics in the technically developed nations of Europe - well behind Spain and Italy," he said. "We have a lot of robotics talent in our universities with enormous potential to bring the UK to hi-tech glory."

A robot called Pepper that claims to read and react to human emotions using a range of sensors has been unveiled by Japanese communications giant Softbank.

Cameras in the robot's head can read facial expressions and 3D movement, while four microphones detect voice tones. Touch sensors allow the robot to react to contact with the face and hands.

Other sensors in Pepper's legs detect obstacles while the robot is moving around and it features auto balance to prevent it falling over.

"Pepper also comes equipped with capabilities and an interface that enables communication with people, including the latest voice recognition technology, superior joint technology to realise graceful gestures, and emotion recognition that analyses expressions and voice tones." Softbank said.

The robot could be used in medical applications, where emotions need to be read by staff in order to react to patients' needs, for example.

Pepper was developed with Aldebaran Robotics, a specialist in creating humanoid and programmable robots.

Bruno Maisonnier, founder and CEO of Aldebaran said: "For the past nine years, I've believed that the most important role of robots will be as kind and emotional companions to enhance our daily lives, to bring happiness, constantly surprise us, and make people grow."

"The emotional robot will create a new dimension in our lives and new ways of interacting with technology. It's just the beginning, but already a promising reality. Thanks to Pepper, the future begins today and we want all of you to be a part of it."

Pepper is set to launch in Japan in February 2015 and will cost 198,000 JPY (1,150) and will come with an SDK for developers that is due to launch in September.

IT Pro approached Softbank for comment on UK availability, but no response had been received at the time of publication. However, the company has said it will launch outside of Japan in the future presumably after measuring the success of the humanoid in there first.

Intel is aiming to drive innovation in the automotive, display, robotic and wireless charging markets.

At its future showcase in London, Intel demoed a range of prototypes, some of which will be on general release before the end of 2014.

Floating display

One of the most interesting demos on show was the "floating display" developed by Intel's Perceptual Computing lab.

Using the 3D camera, Ultrabook and glass placed at a 90 degree angle, Intel has created the illusion of a display hovering in mid-air.

It's possible to interact with the display - pressing buttons, swiping through videos and drawing - all by waving your hand through the air.

Such a display would be ideal in classrooms, boardrooms and retail environments. The reference design is most likely to be brought to market by a third party OEM rather than Intel but there is no date for commercialisation yet.

Wireless charging

The ability to charge devices without the need to plug in a cable is not a novel idea and has been implemented in the mobile market by firms including Samsung and Nokia. However, it has yet to take off - and cables are still the primary method of charging.

First generation wireless charging technology has been limited as it require devices to be placed perfectly on a charging mat, has limited range and does not function in the presence of metallic objects such as keys.

Intel is pushing for the use of Magnetic Resonance technology, which it claims is more practical. The technology is able to transfer power to devices with minimal contact and is even conducive through variety of materials like books and clothing. The technology is also able to charge multiple devices with different power requirements at the same time, so you can charge smartphones, tablets and laptops together. It's also capable of working in the presence of other metallic items such as keys and coins.

The reference device on show was a wireless charging bowl, which is ideal for use at home. The idea is that when a user gets home they can drop their keys and devices into the bowl and it will charge them. Intel is in talks with a number of partners. Although they remain unspecified at this time, an announcement is expected to be made in the coming weeks.

Solar charging

Sticking on the theme of power, the boom in portable devices also means an increase in power consumption.

Power grids in countries like the UK are expected to start buckling under the strain in the next decade, and the need to push renewable energy is a priority not just for energy firms but tech companies.

A good place to test out renewable energy is in the developing world. Intel has developed a 2-in-1 reference device codenamed Palace Hill, which is designed to be used by school children in places like Africa. To enable the laptop to be used in the most remote areas, Intel has looked to make use of solar energy.

The reference device has "Alternative Power Architecture" built into it so it charged directly from a solar panel.

Devices which do not have the relevant silicon embedded can still be charged via solar energy. They simply need to be plugged into the little yellow box known as the Smart Solar Controller, which is also able to charge multiple devices at the same time.

Charging times will vary depending on the sunlight on any particularly day, but at its optimum it is able to charge devices at the same rate as traditional socket.

Jimmy the Robot

Intel researcher Brian Johnson believes there will come a time when robots will become as common as smartphones. To drive an interest in AI, Intel has kicked off its 21st Century Robot initiative.

The firm is planning on making the specifications for Jimmy the Robot available download after an event in May. This will allow developers and enthusiasts to print off a 3D model and bring him to life - for under $1000.

Once printed and assembled, users will be able to program and install applications - giving Jimmy a personality. Intel is also encouraging developers to design their own robots to drive technology forward.

Smart cars of the future

There have been a lot of demos from car companies like Audi and Mercedes showcasing driving in the future. Google is also developing its self-driving cars and has clocked up thousands of miles in road tests.

The world's largest chipmaker is keen to get in on the act, and don't be surprised to see the "Intel Inside" badge cars in the future.

But how smart can we really expect cars to get? Intel's driving simulator offered a glimpse. Touch screens are expected to be implemented into the dashboard and in from of passengers.

When you enter the car, you'll be required to authenticate yourself by tapping your smartphone. The idea is that the car will then automatically be able to bring up your preferences like music. When you stop at a red-light, the car will count down the time to green and showcase important information on your touch screen.

Cars of the future will depend heavily on the Internet of Things, according to Intel. Everything from traffic signals to school buses and parking spaces will need to transmit data to cars, in order to make journeys more efficient.

Intel representatives did tell IT Pro the firm is in talks with various car manufacturers and an announcement in this space is expected to be made soon.

Ultrabooks to have 3D cameras as standard

Intel has been keen to highlight the need for perceptual computing - whereby users are able to interact with their devices by using speech and motion.

The late-2014 generation of Ultrabooks will all have a 3D-camera embedded into them. Early implementations of gestures are likely to focus on basic games. But Intel is hoping commonly used programs will also make use of the technology. For example, Intel suggested that you could wave to hands to move between slides in PowerPoint.

Google has further demonstrated its interest in robotics by investing in a Silicon Valley start-up that specialises in the field.

The internet giant, which has acquired eight robotics companies in the past 12 months, has not revealed how much it has invested in Savioke, as the company is called.

However, the nascent business has revealed it has received 1.2 million in seed finance from sources including Google Ventures, the company's investment arm.

Savioke is yet to reveal its first product. What is known about the company, however, is that its robots are focused on the service industry and initial customer trials are set to be carried out at some point this year.

In a blog post, Steve Cousins, CEO of Savioke, said: "We are passionate about delivering easy-to-use, yet sophisticated robots that can help people.

"Our goal is to improve the lives of people by developing and deploying robotic technology in service environments."

Andy Wheeler, general partner at Google Ventures, added: "As the lines continue to blur between industrial and personal robotics industries, Google Ventures is thrilled to be working with an exceptional group of people at Savioke.

"Steve and his team already have had a lot to do with moving the robotics industry forward. The next act promises to be even more revolutionary."

University of Oxford researchers are working to address privacy concerns caused by the way we interact with humanoid robots.

According to the academics, robots are expected to be walking around on our streets within the next decade and assisting people with their daily lives, a prospect that has prompted security and privacy concerns.

Dr Ian Brown, associate director of Oxford University's Cyber Security Centre and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: "When we begin to interact with friendly-looking humanoid robots, our expectations and assumptions shift.

"New questions arise about how much we trust them. Some people might form an emotional attachment to them, particularly in situations where robots play the role of companions."

Brown argues this raises new questions around privacy, such as robots accidentally revealing the identities of people they have seen' and heard' when transmitting visual and audio data.

Therefore, Brown, who is leading the 2 million three-year project, and his team are trying to find ways to embed privacy technology and protocols.

"It is important...their information gathering is restricted to what is needed to interact and carry out their tasks, and information about the identity of their human users is kept to a minimum. Otherwise, these robot friends' could betray the trust of the people they come into contact with, passing on information to third parties," he warned.

Dr Joss White, who is working with Brown on the research, added: "While they provide opportunities to make our lives easier, the potential loss of control over this information should concern us.

"At Oxford we have been exploring how individuals can maintain control over information about themselves, while still enjoying the potential benefits of robotic technology."

Brown will be presenting his research at the upcoming Oxford London Lecture, to be held in Westminster on 18 March. More information on the event can be found here.

Engineering and robotics firm Boston Dynamics has become the eighth robotics company to be acquired by Google in the past six months.

The company was founded in 1992 and builds mainly animal-themed, walking robots. The best known of these is BigDog a quadruped all-terrain robot built for the Pentagon with DARPA funding. It has also created Cheetah, which boasts a top speed of over 28 mph and is the fastest legged robot, and bipedal search and rescue robot Atlas.

According to the New York Times (NYT), the company will honour its existing military contracts post acquisition, including a $10.8 million agreement to supply Atlas robots to participate in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. However, Google will not move to become a military contractor in its own right, a spokesperson cited by the NYT said.

Little is known about Google's robotics plans, other than the fact the unit is being overseen by Andy Rubin, who spearheaded the development of the company's Android mobile operating system.

While Boston Dynamics is an established and relatively well-known organisation, the other seven robotics acquisitions made by Google have been start-ups.

Humanoid robot makers Meka Robotics and Redwood Robotics, robotic camera systems maker Bot & Dolly, and its sister company ad house Autofuss have all been acquired by Google.

Meanwhile, machine vision and robotic arm pioneer Industrial Perception, and robotic wheel maker Holomni, all based in Silicon Valley, were also snaffled by the web giant during 2013 along with Japanese start-up Schaft.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed the acquisition had taken place, but declined to comment further on the takeover or Rubin's project as a whole.

Google is on a ten-year mission to build robots that will automate the manufacturing stages of product design.

According to a New York Times report, the search company has been on a spree of buying robotics companies over the last six months to produce the next generation of robots. The person reportedly heading up the project is ex-Android chief Andy Rubin.

The robots are set to be used to automate and speed up the process of making products. Furthermore, the firm is taking steps to build robots that will travel in Google's automated car and deliver goods to the door. Google believes these are areas where there is room for improvement in the way tasks are carried out.

Rubin has convinced Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to back the venture.

The firm has acquired a tranche of companies in the US and Japan, including Schaft, which builds humanoid robots, and start-up Industrial Perception. This company develops robotic vision and arms for loading and unloading vehicles. It has also snapped up Meka and Redwood Robotics, two companies that build robots and robotic arms and Bot & Dolly, which produces robot camera systems.

Two other firms, Autofuss and Holomni, have also been ushered into the Google stable to provide design expertise.

It is hoped this will lead to the creation of a mobile, agile robot, according to the report.

The project to build a robot may take around ten years to come to fruition, but Rubin said the technology is mature enough and the opportunities were there to improve manufacturing and logistics using robots.

"I feel with robotics it's a green field," Rubin told the publication. "We're building hardware, we're building software. We're building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack."

Earlier this week, retail giant Amazon outlined its vision to use unmanned drones to deliver products to customers within the next half a decade.

The European Commission (EC) has launched an initiative to help companies take a larger share of the global robotics market.

The commission has joined forces with European robotics manufacturers and research institutes to launch a Public Private Partnership (PPP).

The partnership is set to launch in 2013 and is the latest part of the EC's continuing Digital Agenda.

A strong robotics industry is key to Europe's future competitiveness.

The EC has already funded more than 120 robotics research projects worth around 600 million (482 million) in the last five years.

EC vice president Neelie Kroes signed a Memorandum of Understanding to help strengthen the EU robotics sector.

The commission said that robotics is an important driver in the European economy, with the sector accounting for about a quarter of the worldwide production in industrial robotics.

The domestic and professional service robot markets are expected to grow by 40 per cent in the coming years, with the strongest growth in rescue, security and professional cleaning applications, the EC claims.

By 2020, the commission said service robotics could reach a market volume of more than 100 billion per year.

The PPP will be responsible for improving the industrial competitiveness of Europe through innovative robotic technologies, as well as providing robotic products and services as key enablers to help solve Europes societal challenges.

It also plans to strengthen the networking activities of the European robotics community and reach out to existing and new users.

"A strong robotics industry is key to Europe's future competitiveness. Growing our robotics industry means new jobs and a strong European manufacturing sector," said Kroes.

The EC did not divulge which academic institutions and companies will be part of the PPP, but said that partners would prepare a proposal that the Commission would examine and endorse.

It's no secret that what Hollywood believes a computer is capable of often bears little resemblance to the real thing. Nonetheless, in an ideal world, what are the technologies from our movie and television screens that would actually prove useful in a real life scenario?

Here are a few of our suggestions - let's hear some of yours in the comments at the end.

Instant Updates

Surely the biggie. Hollywood blockbusters, when they're not insisting that a computer makes a sound every time a character appears on the screen, will happily show that everything you do on a PC or Mac happens in an instant. There's no hourglass, there's no waiting for a web page to load. It's click your fingers, and what you want is always at your fingertips. Marvellous.

Everything Is Easily Trackable

There's clearly an element of truth to this, but in the land of fiction, all you need to hunt down somebody's e-mail history, or deleted documents, is a character from the shadows. Where this person got their skills from is never explained, just that they can get you any piece of information that you need, and quickly. It comes back to everything being at your fingertips whenever you want it. And that very rarely happens.

Genuinely Innovative Touchscreen Interfaces

The biggest barrier between humans and computers in the real world has traditionally been the interface, whether it's the keyboard, mouse or on-screen user interface. Films such as Quantum of Solace and Minority Report have little time for clicking around a Windows desktop, though, instead opting for fast-moving touchscreen displays.

Non-Microsoft Software

It's very rare that you see an interface in a big budget movie that reflects that of the Windows operating system. Instead, big corporations in films and TV increasingly seem to have some kind of more tailored operating system that nobody ever seems to grumble about. The main advantage here for the real life IT department? Cutting out the cost of the Microsoft licence, easily one of the biggest outlays in modern day computing. In films such as Anti-Trust, the thrust is on a push to open source. And in the modern day office, that equals not insignificant savings on the budget

Voice Recognition That Works

Science-fiction is to blame for this one of course. How many movies do you see where someone barks out some exact orders to a computer, and it can both decipher it and enter into some kind of conversation with you? How easy would that make troubleshooting simple tasks, if you could just have a chat with the computer in question, and all would be fine and dandy? We're not just talking Star Trek here, either, as Hollywood increasingly seems to be believe that the future job of a computer is to sit down and have a chat.

Universal Programming Language

Swordfish, starring John Travolta and Hugh Jackman, is the example that springs to mind here. Never mind what hacker you see, or what programmer is trying to bash something together, there's never any moment where they have to stop and look everything up in a book. There's not even a moment of recognition, usually, of a programming language when they take a butchers at a screen of code. Instead, everything is instantly recognised, and no programming challenge takes more than three attempts to resolve. Marvellous. That'll cut down on the overtime.

Decreasing Reliance On Human Beings

This obviously has a massive downside, ranging from less people in work, through to Cylons rampaging through the galaxy and destroying the world. However, one of the upsides of omnipotent and omnipresent computers is that more and more, human beings get cut out of the chain. The biggest threat to computer security? That'll be the person using it, and no matter how tight a strategy is put into place, it's bound to be a human being who manages to break it somewhere along the line

Obvious Visual Cues When Something Is Wrong

As many network administrators can tell you, many threats to an infrastructure can lie undetected for some time before the payload is activated. Although this is more common in small offices rather than big ones, a piece of malware can lie undetected for some time, wreaking havoc before somebody picks up on it.

No such problem in the movies, however. Here, if your computer is infected, your computer will have some massive klaaxon to alert you to the fact. There's no messing around, no snooping or anything like that required. When the fit hits the shan, you're left in little doubt.

All The Vital Data You Need Can Be Held On One Disk

A prime example of this syndrome is Die Hard 4 where the villains are able to download all of America's financial data onto a Palm PDA There is a certain advantage to having absolutely any vital piece of information you may ever need fit onto whatever disk you happen to be carrying. The Disk Full' message appears to be an alien concept to the majority of films and TV shows, and that makes a heavy investment in bank after bank of hard drives a less important one. Again, there's cash waiting to be saved

A Big Stomping Robot

There's surely no IT department in the world that wouldn't, at some point, want the might of computing power to generate a (non-lethal) creation such as the odd robotic sight at the end of Superman III. That or, with a nod to Weird Science, the ability to design someone on their machine and have them come to life in front of them. Might not get any computers fixed for a while, though.

Have we missed anything out? Then add your thoughts below. Scarily, it's worth considering that some of the innovations that we've outlined above are either in some degree of development, or perhaps even already deployed in one form or another. The giant robot aside, of course

A team at Georgia Tech Research Institute in the US is teaching robots how to deceive other machines and humans.

It may sound like a plot for a movie but the researchers have a serious aim. Robots are being used increasingly for search and rescue missions.

In a scenario that echoes the Terminator movies, it is possible that two robots from opposing armies may be involved in the same mission.

One robot might be clearing mines and the other is sent to prevent it from completing its task. The ability to recognise the situation and then be able to hide would be an essential aim for the first robot.

In the researcher's terms, circumstances for deception had to satisfy two main criteria. The first is that there must be a sense of conflict between the robots. Second, there must be a benefit in performing the deception.

Ronald Arkin, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, and his team developed software for the robots and set up a "playground" for a hi-tech game of hide and seek.

Coloured marker pins were set up pointing to three possible hiding places for the first robot to choose. The markers stopped short of the actual safe areas.

The twisted intelligence incorporated in the programming allowed the lying robot to select a hiding place and then devise a path that would fool the chasing robot.

As the robot moved, it knocked over the coloured pins, leaving a track of its movements. The machine headed directly for a particular hiding place and, when it reached the unmarkered ground, quickly changed direction to outfox the chasing robot.

In 40 trials, the lying robot successfully fooled its pursuer 75 per cent of the time.

Small beginnings and no full marks for the robot but Arkin said that it demonstrated that machines could learn and use deceptive signals.

He said, "The results were also a preliminary indication that the techniques and algorithms described in the paper could be used to successfully produce deceptive behaviour in a robot."

The team envisage taking their research on to create more sophisticated robots. In the future, a rescue robot may need to deceive a human in order to calm them down in a dangerous situation.

Arkin said that he sees the work of his team as an important development but realises the ethical issues that surround the concept of deceitful robots.

Research into how human brains interpret our senses could pave the way for robots whose fingertips are as as sensitive our own.

If the study, carried out by teams at Edinburgh and University of Sheffield universities, continues to be successful, it could pave the way for mammoth developments in the areas of prosthetic limbs or work in high-danger environments like bomb disposal.

Boffins at the institutions are using artificial mouse whiskers, connected to a robotic brain, to try and analyse how our brain processes what we feel when we touch things. In doing so, they have been able to mirror how the brain interprets whisker movement based on direction and build associated profiles that will enhance future robot design.

"The next generation of robots will learn from experience just as we do," said Professor Tony Prescott, of the University of Sheffield's Department of Psychology, in a statement. "This study is helping us to understand how the brain learns, without a teacher, to extract useful information from sensory signals."

The teams now hope to expand the scope of their research to cover how the brain understands the different shapes of objects it encounters.

Click here for our feature on the future of robotics.