Driving cars, communicating, making music – none presents a challenge to robots these days. In autumn 2013, the first opera to feature performing, musical robots premiered in Philadelphia and New York.

Rolf Lakämper, Professor for Robotics at Temple University in Philadelphia, worked with composer Maurice Wright to create the opera. Almost 30 years ago, the mathematician founded Germany’s first gaming company “Magic Bytes” and the 8-bit game Mission Elevator. Today he develops autonomous robots. Rolf talked to us about what robots can do these days, what they will be able to do in future – and what they probably won’t.

Rolf, you research and develop autonomous robots. They roll around the Temple University campus in Philadelphia and talk to students. Do you tell them where to go – like with a remote controlled car – or do they decide for themselves where they want to go?

The robots steer themselves autonomously, of course. I take them to campus and tell them to roam around to explore their world. They have to locate themselves in space. Each one has a built-in camera and a laser scanner to create a map of the area and to identify its location on the map at the same time. It explores the university campus completely on its own.

After the robot has moved around the area for a while, could you ask it where the dining hall is? 

Yes, I could do so. But to answer such a question, the robot needs to name or to label the newly discovered places. That’s why, by the time it locates a new item in the environment, it will ask a student about its name – and now it knows where the dining hall is, for example. Hence, from then on, it can solve navigation tasks, for example finding the best way to get to the dining hall.

How does a robot talk to students? 

It has a laptop with an integrated microphone and speaker that runs language and language recognition software. There is nothing particularly special about it; the software has been around for a while.

Seeing and speaking are no problem, but understanding and recognition are still tough.

What is currently the biggest challenge in robot development? 

Seeing and speaking are no problem, but understanding and recognition are still tough. In other words: evaluating the content and recognizing connections is the challenge. Robots initially just see a lot of tiny pixels they need to unify. Understanding an environment is quite another task. A step to it is classification and inference – for example, when a robot classifies the data it sees as "street", it will also expect cars driving on it.

How do you build your robots, do you have your own workshop?

I don’t build the robots, nor do I develop the language recognition. Those are off the shelve. I just create the bit that goes in behind the eyes, the programming of algorithms for visual understanding. My robots do not look particularly impressive: they are more like a box on three wheels with technical looking lasers and cameras on top. However, now that we have 3D printers, I also sometimes print out smaller robots myself using MakerBots, the plastic printers you see everywhere. I print out the plastic components and install tiny motors and computers.

Self-learning robots have become a widely discussed issue right now. How intelligent have robots become? 

The internet offers a huge data pool robots can draw from. We have a small humanoid robot in the lab, which we gave the knowledge about its body features – you could say it knows that it looks human. Now when we tell it the name of a human pose, like the yoga “warrior pose” for example, it is able to use the google image search function to look for pictures of people in that pose. It filters out the most common ones that seem significant – and after around 10 seconds, my robot has learned the pose and is able to perform it. Getting robots to develop an understanding of the functionality of objects in their environment will go very quickly. We will make huge strides here over the next 5 to 10 years.

What will robots be to us in the future: more a good friend, or a household helper?

Household robots represent a giant movement in robotics right now. There is a robot, for example, that can independently find recipes on the internet, then go to the fridge, retrieve all the ingredients, and prepare the dish. The same robot can also fold towels; the only problem is that it still takes three hours to fold just one towel. But there is just as much research into the social aspects – how robots interact with people – as there is into their physical progress. This is important for household robots too: a robot that empties the dishwasher is not very useful if it talks to you in such a stiff manner that you don’t want to use it. It is extremely important that robots seem human in order to make us accept to work with them.

What will our interactions with robots look like twenty years down the road – will they be living in our homes? 

I really hope that a robot will be helping me out of the bathtub in a retirement home by then! Robots will have made inroads into elder care in particular, into medicine, our homes and transportation. For instance, I am sure no one will be driving him/herself around anymore by then.

"I really hope that a robot will be helping me out of the bathtub in a retirement home by then!"

You said that the military is also interested in the technology. Whose hands should this technology never fall into?

Although personally I am in favor of education and against regulation, at this point anything having to do with weapons has to be regulated and should not be in anyone’s hands really. It is important that the government take preemptive action here. Every new technology can also become a threat if not handled responsibly.