Last month, as part of its 10-year industrial strategy, the government announced £40m of funding to create a network of robotics adoption hubs, which is being seen as a pivotal moment in the UK’s journey towards robotics leadership.
While there appears to be a lot of noise coming from the government about the UK becoming a leader in artificial intelligence (AI), the strategy’s funding shows that the government is also looking at robotics.
There has been plenty of progress putting robots to use in industry, but the ultimate goal is to have humanoid robots who can live and work alongside people.
However, this technology is still at a very early stage of development, and many questions remain over its viability, such as whether people will accept humanoids in society, or if it will be a technology that is so expensive only the wealthy can afford it.
In a policy document published in March, the National Robotarium, a research institute at Heriot-Watt University, urged the government to help the UK become a producer of robots – not just a consumer – creating jobs and delivering economic growth. “We need to move fast,” Steve Maclaren, the CEO of the National Robotarium, said in the document.
The National Robotarium is part of the Data-Driven Innovation initiative, supported by £21m from the UK government and £1.4m from the Scottish government.
The initiative aims to turn Edinburgh into the data capital of Europe, and is part of the wider £1.5bn Edinburgh and South-East Scotland city region deal.
Building on the success of the National Robotarium, Maclaren said there needs to be a UK-wide network of robotic centres of excellence, linked closely to leading academic institutions and industry, across the nations and regions of the UK. “These centres of excellence will form the hearts of robotics clusters to create new products powered by robotics and AI – to help people in their places of work and their homes,” he stated in the policy document.
The National Robotarium was one of the organisations exhibiting at the Goodwood Festival of Speed Future Labs exhibition, as part of an outreach programme giving the public an opportunity to interact with and watch robots perform tricks.
Among the exhibits it had on show was Ameca, a humanoid robot made by British company Engineered Arts. Ameca has been designed and programmed in a way that simulates natural human interaction. “Ameca can converse with you and pretty much mimic human communication skills,” said Maclaren. “We are talking about eye contact, gestures and facial expression, movement of the lips and movement of the eyelids. That’s how we as humans communicate.”
Maclaren said Ameca is also able to capture and learn from interactions with individual people using machine learning, in a way that mimics how people remember previous conversations they have had with someone. ChatGPT 4.0 is part of Ameca’s underlying technology, along with text-to-speech, and it also uses the Google MediaPipe framework for face detection.
Morgan Stanley Research has estimated that the humanoids market is likely to reach $5tn by 2050, and that there could be more than a billion humanoids in use by 2050.
According to Maclaren, robots like Ameca will address labour shortages and fulfil a range of repetitive tasks that humans are increasingly reluctant to carry out. For instance, he said such humanoid robots could be deployed in hazardous industries, removing human beings from dangerous environments.
They also have the potential to re-shape the future of healthcare as the world faces up to the significant challenges of a rapidly ageing population. Maclaren sees humanoid robots being increasingly used in domestic settings by ordinary citizens to carry out tasks that become more difficult as people grow older.
Updated research from the Government Office for Science shows that a humanoid robot costs anywhere between $35,000 and $150,000. It notes that there is substantial uncertainty about how businesses and the public would respond to humanoid robots and whether they could offer substantially better value for money than alternative automation services.
Maclaren believes assessing the value for money of robots is either about using them to remove a cost or improve productivity. Using the example of a robot developed with enough dexterity to handle fruit, he said: “If you’re looking for productivity, you may increase your workflow by adding robots to your existing processes.”
Maclaren sees robots addressing the skills gap while still maintaining the existing human workforce. “It’s collaboration,” he said. “If you’re looking for efficiencies, robotics can help in lights-out operations. What you end up with is almost a double shift where humans come in during the day and then you can have robots on the night shift.”
But as the Government Office for Science points out, there is a high level of technological uncertainty as to how humanoids will improve, on what timescales, and if they will be cost-effective.
The current cost of the most advanced humanoid robots certainly limits such machines to only those people who can afford to splash out the significant amount of money needed to purchase one. The UK minimum wage is £12.25 an hour, which means a humanoid robot capable of operating three eight hour shifts, 365 days a year, could deliver payback within 12 to 18 months. Clearly replacing or supplementing higher earners, or using less-skilled workers alongside a specialist humanoid robot to save on labour costs, offers a compelling case for organisations facing a skills shortage to purchase such machines.
However, research from Morgan Stanley suggests a general-purpose humanoid capable of doing a vast array of useful tasks at home will require technological progress in both hardware and AI models. It predicts these developments are about a decade away.
Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s head of global autos and shared mobility research, said that for humanoids to be available in homes, prices need to decline significantly, in parallel with regulatory and societal acceptance of the technology.
