Whatever happened to robots? In the Seventies there seemed little doubt that by the end of the 20th century we would each have a personal butler-droid who cooked breakfast, cleaned the house and did the ironing. Like CP30 in Star Wars, but less irritating.

The problem, says Alan Winfield, is that, “It turned out to be immensely more difficult to build robots to do stuff for us than we expected.” We can construct robots that spray-paint cars because the environment is created especially for them. Putting robots into an unpredictable environment is much harder.

For years experts in artificial intelligence believed that robots needed a model of the world in their brains. The result was machines that computed very slowly and then moved a couple of centimetres. Now they are modelled on simple animals, which don’t need such internal models of the world but can still function in it.

In five years’ time, voice recognition will probably allow humans to issue basic commands to robots. But we need a better understanding of the human brain before we can construc t a truly intelligent robot. Winfield expects this to take more than a century, but can see a time when people will be able to discuss art and philosophy with robots. “Companion robots” are being built, but initially “the quality of the companionship will be very poor”. Eventually humans could fall in love with robots, but Winfield says he would be “concerned about the quality of the love that is returned”. He is alarmed by the drift towards militarisation of robots: “Would you trust a robot with a gun and the intelligence of an ant?”

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He is interested in swarm robotics, inspired by examples of extraordinary collective behaviour in nature, such as the construction of termite mounds. Large numbers of robots could work together in mining, search and rescue, pollution monitoring or harvesting. Robots might live in fields, find pests, eat them and derive energy from them.

There are already “robots” on the market that will vacuum your floor, but in the medium term we will not have humanoid housekeepers. “We will have lots of robots in our lives, though,” Winfield says. “They will probably live in the skirting board and scuttle around, and we will hardly even notice them – we won’t think of them as robots.”

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