If you've given up on your childhood dreams of a brave new world where we're served by robots, think again. David Clensy meets the man behind the Bristol laboratory which is working towards making those dreams a reality

Anyone who grew up on a diet of The Jetsons, Metal Mickey and Star Wars would be forgiven for clinging on to their childhood dreams of a future where robots are our friendly domestic servants.

Imagine being welcomed into your home by a humanoid butler nicely polished up like C-3PO or having some robotic helper to wash the dishes or make the bed. More significantly, imagine a reliable mechanical friend whose every concern was to care for its elderly owner, or the robotic buddy who could give a disabled youngster a new degree of independence.

Whatever happened to a “future” where we were able to live side by side with robots?

According to Professor Chris Melhuish we could be just decades away from the real possibility of useful domestic robotic servants.

Professor Melhuish is director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory – a joint venture between the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol. The centre, which is the biggest robotics laboratory in the UK, has just received a research grant of £1 million from the European Commission to attempt to develop robots that can work alongside humans safely in the home. The four-year project has been dubbed Chris – Co-operative Human Robot Interaction Systems.

“If we're going to have domestic robots that are useful, it means they could also be potentially dangerous,” explains Professor Melhuish as he leads the way through the DuPont Building at UWE's Frenchay Campus.

“I'm not talking about that 'robots taking over the world' nonsense that writers always come up with. I simply mean that there could be more basic dangers like hot water being spilt on people or undue force being exerted by robots feeding an elderly person.

“These are the things we're going to have to consider. When we interact with other humans we're interpreting facial expressions, body positions, gestures and tone of voice as well as sharing a goal and understanding and following verbal instructions and non-verbal utterances. This project aims to develop the technology we need to introduce this level of sophistication into service robots who are working closely with people.”

Robots are currently used widely in manufacturing, but they are usually limited in the tasks they perform and there are often physical barriers between robots and people.

“In a domestic situation,” says Professor Melhuish, “we need to have rules and the engineering in place so that interaction can be made safe for the humans. A key premise of this project is that it will be beneficial to our society and our economy.

“If we can provide the cognitive process – the 'thinking' – that's necessary for safe robot-human co-operation we will be a step closer to having robots in our homes.

“In our ageing society, can you imagine how useful robotic servants could be for the elderly?”

The project is multi-disciplinary, involving robotic engineers, cognitive scientists and psychologists.

The main robotics lab at the DuPont building is sub-divided into dozens of screened areas, each playing host to a different robotic experiment. One workstation has a robotic head on the desk while at the neighbouring booth a researcher is working on the movement of an android torso. It doesn't take too much imagination to envisage all the different elements coming together to make the robots we all dreamed about having around the house when we were young.

“A lot of our work is about looking at the systems that have proven to be successful in the natural world and working out how we can use these models to develop artificial intelligence systems,” Professor Melhuish explains.

“Although a lot of the time we're looking to the human body for answers – a successful robot doesn't necessarily need to be built in a humanoid form.

“The human form often has clear benefits – there are reasons why we've evolved the way we have. Our hands are on the ends of our arms so we can reach out for things; our eyes are in our heads so that we can easily shift our gaze.

“But there's no reason why we can't take successful elements from other creatures,” he adds, leading the way to a robot head with long wiry whiskers.

“For example, with this robot we're trying to recreate the sophisticated way in which a rat can make sense of its environment largely by using its whiskers.

“That's something that could be very useful for police divers, for example, who need to create a picture of what's underwater, even though they can't see through the muddy waters.”

Indeed, the potential for robotics in the future of humanity is enormous – imagine how the military could use robots in the fiercest battles rather than risking the lives of their soldiers or how emergency services could use robots to rescue people trapped in precarious situations. Imagine rehabilitation robots that could work like tireless physiotherapists on patients' injuries – hospitals could be revolutionised by these developments.

Another useful by-product of this kind of robotic evolution could be increasingly sophisticated robotic prosthetic limbs. Though they're not the specific goals of projects at the DuPont building, all of these exciting developments could grow out of the Bristol team's research.

However, the robotic development taking place at the Bristol Robotics Lab does cover an extraordinarily wide range of projects. In fact, in one area scientists are even working on a robot that could find its energy by eating flies.

But for Professor Melhuish and the team on the Chris project, the brief is clear – to make safe robotic domestic servants.

“This will take time to develop,” he says. “But I can imagine that perhaps 50 years from now domestic robots will be an every day fact of life. And that means that an enormous industry could develop around them. That's an industry that the UK can't afford to miss being a part of.”

But first there's a lot of work to do – and often, the starting point seems to be creating robotic elements to match the sophistication of the human body.

In one area the developers are creating computerised “eyes” that respond to the movements of their owners' eyes and faces.

Professor Melhuish says: “We need the robot to be able to look at you and interpret the facial expressions that we all take for granted – that means creating an artificial intelligence that will know when it should look at the human and when it should follow a point or focus on a particular task.

“This alone is highly complex. Behavioural reactions may come naturally to us but they're incredibly sophisticated for a robot.”

And in turn, people need to be able to respond to the facial expressions of the robots – that means them having a face in the first place. “We're experimenting with different types of faces,” he says.

“We have complex mechanical faces that have remarkably human-like features. But we're also working on digital screen faces – which would be considerably cheaper and may be able to do the job just as well.”

So, could this be the face of man's new best friend?

“There's still years of work to be done, but I can envisage a time when domestic robots could make all our lives easier,” Professor Melhuish says. “Robotics could well be the revolutionary industry of the 21st century.”