Question: what will your project bring to the world?

Alan Winfield answered on 16 Mar 2011:

Well the answer depends on which project you mean. If you go on my profile page here /chlorinem11-zone/profile/alanwinfield and click on Me and My Work, you will see I describe 3 big projects. The first, called ‘the emergence of artificial culture in robot societies’ is more of a science project that is trying to help understand how culture (or traditions) emerge and spread. By making an artificial society with robots we are trying to get right down to the detail of how behaviours change as they get copied from one ‘thing’ to another. I say thing because we hope that what we find might apply to animals and even humans, as well as robots. So this project brings, I hope, greater understanding to the world.

The second project, called Symbrion, is much more robotic. Here we are trying to build a swarm of robots that can self-assemble into a bigger robot. Eventually we think that could be used in the real world for lots of different applications, including for instance search and rescue. It’s not hard to imagine given the huge earthquakes in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago, and Japan last week. As you know it’s incredibly dangerous for the rescue workers to try and find survivors. It would be really great if the rescue workers could first send a swarm of small and light robots to search all of the spaces in the collapsed building for survivors, give first aid to the survivors directly, allow the rescue workers to see and talk to them and, at the same time, provide the rescue workers with a 3D map of the collapsed building and where the survivors are so that they can then carefully dig them out. I think that search and rescue robots like these would be an incredible benefit to the world.

The third of my projects is – I hope – bringing a greater understanding of robotics technology to the world. I’m especially interested in the societal and ethical impact of robots in the future and I’m working, with others, to try and develop ethical codes for roboticists, so that future robots will only do the things that we – as a society – decide we want them to do, and equally important – not do the things we don’t want them to do.