Intelligent robots

Press, 22 January 1988, Page 20

Intelligent robots

If robots are to lead useful lives, they must be trained to learn and to communicate with each other. Moreover they must learn for themselves by intelligent experimentation without the need for human instruction when new tasks are given to them. This is the key to the approach adopted at Scotland’s Turing Institute, an independent research organisation set up three years ago to investigate artificial intelligence. While most international effort in robot systems has concentrated on progress with immensely detailed sequences of instructions which the robot follows to the letter, scientists at Turing have focused on machine learning. Here, two robot arms used in the institute’s Freddy 3 system are collaborating in the assembly of a circuit board. Advanced robot systems like this are driven by rules but they can also learn and modify their behaviour and can write their own programmes by using their senses to evaluate critically what they have just done. The Freddy 3 system is the institute’s most advanced and intelligent robot system to date. It uses its own sensory systems — sight, touch and hearing — to programme itself automatically; and it can communicate with other robots and humans with both gestures and speech — a major step towards narrowing the culture gap between humans and machines. London Pictures Service