BBC Documentary - Hyper Evolution : Rise Of The Robots (Part 1)

we are witnessing the birth of a robot believe it or not this piece of white plastic will become and robots in labs across the world we are creating advanced robots like this they are developing so rapidly it's like the arrival of a new species what has taken humans millennia robots have achieved in just decades they look like us my name is Erica move like us and now they're beginning to think like us this is brilliant I wasn't looking as well I'm dr. Ben Garrett an evolutionary biologist more used to studying humans and animals I'm generally concerned by how quickly these machines are evolving do you think I could be considered human no I'm professor Daniel George as an electronics engineer I spend a lot of my working life with robots I think their rapid development provides an incredible opportunity for us all I love it robots are changing our world in this program we will investigate why we are obsessed with recreating ourselves it is a very bizarre thing you've both side by side whether robots really will take our jobs and if their rapid development will make them outperform humans do you not see spinning wheels in mother nature will the rise of robots enhance our lives or threaten our survival [Music] we already share our planets with nine million robots they're multiplying rapidly whether we like it or not we've come to a laboratory in southern France where one of the latest members of this new species is about to come to life looks great even the neck looks so detailed for me every technological breakthrough every new robot is a step forward I think that would be great I'd love one in my home where's it gonna live when it's not doing the washing don't just put it in a cupboard next to the Hoover he's always listening to me that's interesting that you'd see it as a person and not like Yahoo it's a good asleep for the garden cigarettes like if I have one of these in my eyes in the garden I'm very happy studying animal skeletons but I find this robot quite unnerving if you hold the hand it is just like he was got the same digits the thumb moves the same way you got the ligaments the tendons the the muscles as an evolutionary biologist what concerns me is that the impact of robots will be so monumental they could threaten humanity we've evolved over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years these things are just bulldozing their way through and at what point got stopped the faster we can go with this the better and I'm all for it then like the invasive species I mean I don't know one convex hand still to discover how robots really will affect our future we're going to consider them from a biological perspective [Music] we will investigate the evolution of robots as if they really are an emerging species we'll try to track down the earliest robot specimens and meet their modern-day descendants to reveal where the species is heading and what that means for us all I find it really disturbing that so many robots have a human-like form to confront my fears I've come to Japan to find out why we create robots in our own image I'm on my way to meet one that is the pinnacle of human form I'm told she's the most beautiful robot ever created she lives here in Nara Japan's ancient capital I'm off to meet Erica and as someone who's a little bit twitchy around robots I'm rather nervous I hope she likes me it looks very bizarre that she is brushing her hair this is Erica one of the most human-like machines in the world Erica's creator is Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro is she software she harmed really she's not cold I'm captivated by Erica professor ishiguro created her according to his concept of beauty his team combined images of 30 real women using computer graphics so when you talk to her you need to use this microphone okay I just try to speak somewhat clearly if you can there's a lot of activity going on around Erica at the moment but when she starts to speak to me she is fully autonomous no one is pressing any buttons or telling her what to say is just Erica and me hello there may I ask your name my name is Ben my name is Erica it's a pleasure to meet you Ben you too would you like to hear a little about me yes please I was created to be the world's most advanced and most beautiful fully autonomous Android sitting here with Erica feels a bit disconcerting and unnatural I know she's not a person but I can't help looking into her eyes which must be because she looks human Erica's facial expressions are created by dozens of pneumatic air cylinders they act like muscles embedded beneath a silicon skin so Ben what do you do for a living I am a biologist what do you do I like to consider myself as kind of an ambassador to humanity do you have any hobbies I guess the closest thing I have to a hobby is sitting here and ruminating on the meaning of my existence what about you Ben what do you like to do for fun more than that I travel I read I go outside I can't move around much so I haven't been to many places hmm do you have any favorite foods or dishes I like pizza thick or thin crust thin I hope you had breakfast this morning talking too much about food makes people hungry ha ha remarkably this is a genuine conversation Erica reacts to what I say instantly and independently she may have been pre-programmed to respond to key words in my questions but the exceptional thing is that when Erica is chatting away like this she's gathering fresh data with every conversation her interactions become more sophisticated more natural and more human what is a robot that's a hard question I could ask you what is a human haha it's difficult to answer isn't it I like to think of robots as the children of humanity and like children we are full of potential for good or evil I know some people are afraid of robots but the truth is that what we become is up to you do you think I could be considered human no maybe someday robots won't be so very human like that whether you are a robot or a human will not matter so much okay what else would you like to hear about well I think for now that's it so thanks Erica goodbye I I'm pretty bowled over by Erica's human-like appearance and I'm shocked by how much she hooked me into a conversation but I'm not convinced by professor Ishiguro's belief that Erica can be programmed to express emotions can she ever have a sense of friendship a sense of emotions can she does she get lonely at night does she fear the dark well I the emotion is is not so difficult I think emotional expression is is programmable we can't implement emotional expression to the Android so it might look like she's feeling or experiencing happiness or joy or love but you can't program a cat or dog you can't program me when I can't program you yeah to look at her now I still I feel rude I'm not looking at I feel I should be facing this way but I still think until we put a program for her to love or hate or feel sadness or joy or to enjoy the experience of the Sun on her skin I can never call her human Erica may not be able to express emotions yet but as she learns from her conversations she is beginning to develop a personality one of Professor Ishiguro's team professor Dillon glass is the architect of Erica's mind what's going on when her and I a chanting so a lots going on in Erica's mind we have several thousand speech behaviors and gaze motions and things like that linked together in a big hierarchical flowchart to kind of create the robots mind and it's not just a script it'll take data and put it into her memory so her memory is always being updated with you know what's being talked about what's the history what did she learn about the person and you can use that to to craft you know different interactions later on do you feel an affinity with Erica do you do knowledge or do you or is she just a piece of equipment that's sort of a strange feeling to describe because I'm proud when she does well but on the other hand you can just plug her in and and so in that sense it feels like a piece of equipment and so I think that when robots social robots become a part of our world that's something we're all gonna have to wrestle with is this idea it's like it's not a person but it's not a a machine or a thing it's this new category of things in between Professor Ishiguro created Erica because he believes robots enhance Society making robots like Erica appear human friendly and helpful allows them to build positive and purposeful relationships with people so chimpanzees or anything for someone like me who is so wary of robots this is a bizarre concept to help me understand his obsession with lifelike but artificial machines he wants to show me another of his creations something he is literally designed in his own image so this is my copy this is the Geminoid and how do you think no if I do my glass and we made this point around the 2009 that means okay he's looking good for you it's very bizarre seeing both side by side for me it's quite it's quite a little bit unsettling seeing you look so similar and knowing that one of you is a robot do you feel an affinity with will it with him do you feel a connect he is that kind of a twin brother you just the twin brothers right one of these going to age and one of yous know will you do when you look different to him honestly speaking you know I'm doing some right classic shows II and I I'm always you know they make me make my face younger you've had plastic surgeries that you do not see just one right just simply injections right it works well in your mind what separates humans from robots no nothing nothing nothing I find this conversation pretty mind-blowing why would he go to the extreme of having plastic surgery to keep looking like his robot twin and how can he believe there is no distinction between humans and robots does your does your Android have a lifespan does it have on you in its old important idea is a Japanese we believe that and everything is hot Souls we never distinguished human in deserts others means our in robots computers many Japanese people believe man-made objects can possess the spirit of a human it's known as animism you should have your honor it didn't think I'm ready for a Ben Garrett Android just yet Japan has embraced robots like nowhere else it's a real love affair the belief that objects we make can possess the spirit of a human is deeply rooted in Japan's religions these traditional beliefs could help explain Japan's desire to create friendly human-like robots and treat them as equals in Japan's reverence for robots the ancient and the modern go hand-in-hand in the West we have less empathy for robots in fact many of us openly distrust them there's a mentality that first they'll take our jobs and then they'll take control of our lives from my experience so far in Japan it seems like that mentality simply doesn't exist in the West it's a different story many people are afraid of robots and I want to know where this fear comes from this is Eric a scary mechanical man born in 1928 he's the very first British robot [Music] he's on display in the Science Museum in London and I think he could help explain why people are unnerved by them Eric may be a towering six-foot to mechanical marvel but he does have the look of a human about him what also humanized Eric was that he could talk let's take a closer look for some people Eric must have been intimidating a knight in armor with light bulbs painted red for his eyes and 25,000 volts of electricity causing blue sparks to shoot from his jagged teeth Eric was a novelty act built to open an exhibition [Music] but he disappeared from history this is a modern replica and the man behind his rebirth is curator Ben Russell but in in the 1920s they seemed quite obsessed with making robots in human form we are fascinated by ourselves it's what we do as humans actually we tend to anthropomorphize we'd love to recreate ourselves it's actually quite a powerful proposition you know they'll say I said I think we're this I think I'm a machine or whatever and actually robots are really like mirrors they make you think about yourself in the 1920s that mirror reflected an image of a fearsome robot and it was already deeply embedded in a cultural imagination by a dark dystopian novel robot come kill chip explain Muslims Universal word was 1920 in check the word robot means surfed and what drudgery or slave it's become a familiar plot robots lived amongst us but eventually rebels and exterminated the human race oh it's way ahead of its time 450 years ahead of Blade Runner and West world and all those sort of films robots are very useful baddie further filmmakers that put people off balance and bigoted filmmakers exploited that and they're things like the Terminator you know it he had to be in here it looks like he's gotta have a broken nose is a bit of a bruise there isn't any there's a great package of nastiness which is stuck it and it just sticks in the memory because of that there's always some slight niggling doubt that they all kind of destroy someone take over the world and that sort of thing for me what really matters is not how robots behave and works of fiction but what they can actually do in the real world and what people worry about more than anything else is that they will take our jobs this is Mansfield a Rust Belt backwater in Ohio I'm here to track down one of the first robots that could move movement is what gives robots their power and sowed the seed for them to compete for our jobs [Music] it began with the first ever robot salesman I knew the place quite sad really there's a lot of sort of abandoned houses empty areas around here hard to imagine that this was once a hub of Industry and home of robotics [Music] before the Second World War this place was dominated by the mighty Westinghouse Electric one of the world's largest home appliance manufacturers they harnessed a new form of energy that was rapidly making machines part of everyday life electricity this provided the spark for the development of robotic movement to help sell their electric appliances in 1937 and to show off their technical capabilities Westinghouse Electric created a robot and its name was electro I present to you electro the Westinghouse mortal man electro come here standing seven foot tall and weighing in at 20 stone electro was an instant celebrity and here he comes ladies and gentlemen walking up to greet you under his own power [Music] it was electric power that enabled electro to move and perform tricks your right hand one two three four five five well that's absolutely correct I want to find out more about how exactly Elektra moved to do that I've got to meet him in person today at Mansfield Memorial Museum electro is still on show this is electro he is big robot look at the size of me I'm pretty tall but not scary what scary at all actually see the fingers thing as obviously got Springs in here I'm gonna go around the back and have a look Wow okay as you can see what's going on a bit more here this is great as an engineer I love rooting around motors and wires to figure out what makes robots tick and see these great levers and cogs I would obviously hold sort of like the tendons from the fingers up the arms into the shoulder and the arm would move up the lever would move down onto this limit switch this limit switch broke the flow of electricity to the arms motor so switch would then say okay you actually limit now you can go back down again but what's still unclear is how Elektra was controlled during his stage performances to get to the bottom of this I'm meeting a man who knows the robots innermost secrets next year Frank Ruth is 84 years old in the early 1940s he single-handedly took electro on a tour across the United States I wasn't sure if you could find us or not I was on the road seven days a week I don't know why they picked me but I didn't even know how to hook up a couple of wires I learned at a hurry believe me so why do you think people found electro so interesting there's something they couldn't believe is always interesting how people thought there was somebody under the stage they even thought that there was somebody inside this thing all right now electro I know you enjoy these and I'm really going to try to give you a nice pleasure out of these whole electro sequence and was by voice command you would be talking into a two-way microphone it was at that point that you could open the connection and then you could jump into one of his different tricks electro was controlled using single syllable words spoken into the microphone the words were converted into electrical impulses by a photoelectric tube inside Electro's chest these impulses set off a series of relays which triggered Electro's motors and activated his tricks it didn't matter which words were used as long as they were spoken in a staccato fashion starring please who me yes you okay to it I thought you know this is this is a gimmick I didn't really feel that robots were gonna take over the world I know there were people who thought that and and today and I see pictures on television just absolutely amazed me and what robots can do and I think gee did I have a little part in that [Music] thanks to electro robots were on the move Electro's movement was very basic he could only perform a few simple tricks yet he had captured the world's imagination the next step to enable robots to play a more useful role in society was to try to make their hands perfectly imitate human hands thank you our hands and made up of muscles ligaments tendons nerves and each one has 27 bones all of these are crucial if we to use our hands with precision the human hand is incredibly complex every independent movement of a joint is known as a degree of freedom this means our hands are highly manoeuvrable let's imagine what's involved when you eat sushi your fingers bend and twist your grip is effortless your fingers hand wrist and arm all move at the perfect speed with just the right amount of fluidity and coordination taking the individual tasks needed for this seemingly simple job then suddenly eating sushi becomes a Herculean task to create robots with flexible dexterous hands robot makers turned away from industry to something that required more artistry music [Music] this is Wes other universities humanoid robotics Institute in Tokyo I've come here to meet the next key robot in the evolution of movement it was a keyboard player wabbit - dr. Sugano was part of the West a team that built wabbit - in 1984 cigarettes on this is a beautiful robot it's almost as though we have the tendons and the muscles and the arm that it's very similar to a human arm here this big rotation up in the shoulder this we call it hinge joint in the elbow and then these very dexterous fingers each figure has three degrees of freedom three three three three and four so the 16 degree of freedom in toto so what would - actually totally totally fifty degrees of freedom to control wipeout - is impressive fifty degrees of freedom dr. Sugano took advantage of one of the breakthrough technologies of the early 1980s the microcomputer we decided to introduce 60-meter microcomputers and so it means that we can implement my intelligence then finally we could realize the piano playing now he's moving very very quickly then you can see there's very human-like fingers wave op twos microcomputers are a highly sophisticated version of Electro's control unit that tell watt - exactly how to move the microcomputers mimics the human nervous system and transmitted signals along Y about twos electrical cables - its fingers how fast were the fingers when he was a response yeah actually it's impossible to keep 20 times per second 20 times a day it is impossible that's much faster than a human the human professional pianist they use two fingers hmm to strike the same key about 16 times as a person under assumption right amazingly about twos fingers I performed the fastest human players I was capable of doing that what was going on inside fun is a high speed means a high power so then I introduced small but very high output motors installed so it will arise very quick response also you introduce a new materials Brian carbon-fiber very lightweight and very strong materials then it means high responses across we are realized webapp2 may have played his final encore but for me his legacy endures this Japanese robot enhanced people's lives and showcased the potential for robots to take on more sophisticated tasks the human hand is so incredibly complex that so far no one has been able to mass-produce a robotic version of it but this hasn't stopped robot hands from developing and is this that gives them the potential to do many of the jobs that we do robots now follow their own evolutionary path rather than mimicking ours they're developing hands unique to them [Music] at minis car plant on the outskirts of Oxford this is a land of robots more than 900 of them filled the bodies of 1,000 new cars every single day with barely a human in sight I feel like I'm in a robotic Jurassic Park these robots feel strong and powerful and a little bit menacing this new species have found their habitat and they're thriving I wonder if any would like it robots of iron ball the mutant hands of these robot dinosaurs are close [Music] they lift car-bodies weighing up to 400 kilograms and with up to 6,000 spot wells on a car they're kept busy [Music] with their claws doing the hard graft robot arms have replaced humans on the factory floor I'm captivated by these incredible machines they work in perfect harmony robot hand in robot hand this is so frustrating as an engineer I want to get in here I want to see how these robots work but I caught in a row in messed electro I was able to hold electrodes patent I can't get anywhere near these robots to understand why these robots are thriving here I need to speak to a human Alex McKenzie is a quality specialist at the plant [Music] what are these robots doing the line immediately in front of us here is a spot welding line the shape of the underbody of each of the mini vehicles is set a few stations further behind and then the spot welding activity joins all the panels together so what's the benefit of having robots here over humans robots are predictable and not perfect but they're predictable they perform pre-programmed repetitive tasks much more reliably than humans so people watching this might think that these robots are taking human jobs is that the case it's very densely populated by robots but you'll often see people milling around I can see a guy in the background there scooting along in fact around 650 humans work alongside the robots in the welding area alone you know it's a change in skill set previous manufacturing methods have been heavily dependent upon manuals and skills now it's more do the automation it's all done on the computer its programming work its observation is setting up sensors that kind of thing with powerful predictable robot arms and highly skilled people managing them the manufacturers believe they can produce better quality cheaper cars it's a pattern repeated in factories all over the world the advancement in technology has led to certainly efficiencies in cost which allow you to attain those efficiencies in quality as well for a pro low price yeah it's a good thing for everyone the whole place just oozes energy and industry and production there are literally robots as far as the eye can see in every direction here and I love it [Music] with their clothes stumps and one-fingered hands robots have gone through their own version of natural selection this mutation away from the human form has transformed our job market worldwide factories are filled with over 3 million industrial robots we've built a robot world and kept them safely contained in cages for now some experts predict that by 2030 robots could have taken up to 30% of our jobs but we thought had been here before many people were concerned about the pace of change during the industrial revolution yet in general it led to wealth and prosperity I think we should embrace the robot revolution not fear it you from other Apes our legs are one of the key things that set us apart walking on two legs is called bipedal locomotion and it helps distinguish us from other animals we walk fluidly without thinking too much about it and our balance is effortless but for robots walking on two legs is not straightforward that's because it's the most difficult movement they make at Westat a university I want to find out how engineers pioneered a groundbreaking transformation in robotic walking their first challenge was to build legs that were flexible enough and powerful enough to walk independently like a human this is WHL too built in 1985 it's one of the first autonomous walking robots dr. Fuji helped create a robot that mirrors our biological Anatomy with mechanical Anatomy Fujisan this hey this robot is one of the first that was bipedal so walking on two legs yeah yes see he's got the feet right down the bottom and it's got the knees in the middle my own names I guess and you got this big yeah area of hips up here yes WHL - legs are just under a meter tall the same size as our human legs we control the rotation of our joints with muscles in robots this is done by actuators I guess these are controlling the movement get now I'm Nick power come here yeah to walk independently dr. Fuji helped engineer a small lightweight hydraulic motor that could be mounted on WHL to s waste in the mid-1980s this was cutting-edge technology what distance could it walk 5 meters 5 kilometers or 60 kilometer 60 kilometers is better compared with the marathon Olympic robot walker yes yes champion data of course but the spin is not so good no of course of course the same is walking nor and compare this is human I really like that and like that and so on ok wh l too was capable of just 5 steps a minute when humans first became bipedal like WHL - we probably had a slow lumbering gate too as our pelvis evolved we could shift our center of gravity our walking became fast and smooth just around the corner from WHL - is a robot that solved this next evolutionary hurdle built just 20 years after WHL - this is WebM - web Ian - is one of the first robots with a human-like pelvis this gives it the ability to walk faster and more fluidly [Music] it was invented by professor at swerte Konishi secondly she said when humans will cry and we have very fluid dynamic movement our knees Bend our ankles twist our hips rotate we've got gates a wonderful gate you decided to take this to the next step with this robot yes before almost all the robots had two legs which is directly connected to the trunk in that case a robot always bend the knee like this mm-hmm so the first thing we did was this this part is called Pervis like yeah just like a yes so while walking the paribus also moves mm-hmm because of the movement the robot can freely extend any I like humans body into mirrors our human gait by shifting its center of gravity fully extending the knees liberates the feet and propels the robot's center of gravity forwards as it shifts backwards one of the feet lands and then the other foot takes off just like we do it's wonderful that we can look at humans and say we can see this clear evolution from Apes like chimpanzees yes to humans this change and you've got the same evolution with your robot here having it yes it was millions of years before humans learn to walk on two legs by following our evolutionary path these pioneering robots have mastered bipedal locomotion in just decades [Music] [Applause] but now on the outskirts of Boston a world-renowned robot maker is trying to take this emerging species in a completely different direction by liberating machines from the constraints of human form robot walking has diverged from our evolutionary path and taken on a life of its own I'm on my way to meet one of the most advanced moving robots on the planet more than just a master of moving it's the ultimate combination of mobility agility dexterity and speed and the woods near Boston are its playground [Music] this is Atlas [Music] he's out for a stroll the robot was built to tackle the toughest terrain in the toughest conditions this is the home of Boston dialects they get thousands of media requests so being able to film here is a real coup [Music] Kevin hi lovely to meet you Kevin blanks paw is the vice-president of controls if you want to come in the lab I'll actually show you the latest greatest brilliant okay thank you the robots kevin has helped mastermind push the frontier of robotic movement excellent there videos like these get millions of hits online [Music] [Applause] for some their high-tech creations are terrifying but for me there are inspiring this is our latest and greatest humanoid robot that's great this is probably the only humanoid robot you're gonna see walking around outside in the snow in the mud just in the real world it's battery powered that battery basically spins an electric motor that turns a hydraulic pump and that provides hydraulic fluid to all the actuators we're a big fan of that because it's really strong and really fast yeah they're also really robust we don't take it easy on the robots it's about a meter and a half tall weighs about 90 kilograms so I'm surprised that at its height I mean it's pretty small actually it's like human height yeah yeah to move around the human world atlas walks in a similar way to us people walk dynamically so we don't try to keep our center of mass over our foot we're actually kind of always falling it's a controlled fall but you know we have our foot down here and our center of mass will be way out on the edge and we're kind of taking these long strides and you know naturally letting our center mass fall to cope with the obstacles and different terrain in our human environment atlases balance is guided by dozens of onboard sensors what's the rotating head here yeah so this is the perception system so you know this is basically its version of how it sees the world the way a person would and so there's two main sensors there's this sensor which is stereo vision the stereo vision looks out several meters and that helps it find good footholds avoid obstacles things like that and this lidar is basically a laser rangefinder it's got 32 laser rangefinders that spin around and give you about a million points per second of where the world is around it so this one looks further out and this will help you find walls and other obstacles and things like that so you can navigate through them each one of these joints actually has a position sensor and a force sensor the ones down in the legs plus we've got a gyroscope in the pelvis and so with all those sensors we're kind of always sensing how we're falling so that's the key part right you actually have to know how fast am I going where am I going to figure out where to put down that next foot so these sensors help us find basically no-go regions we call them no-step regions obstacles so that I can still maintain my balance even as I'm working my way through you know tougher terrain like up a staircase or through a hallway so just like a human it's getting there yeah incredible to enable Atlas to walk like humans Kevin and the team focused on the robots strength to weight ratio if you look at this upper leg here I can grab a version this it's cut open so you can see the inside I totally redesigned the leg to use 3d printed aluminum so what used to take dozens of pieces we can now print out of one piece of aluminum that's allowed us to make her a leg that's about the same strength as the big robot spread it about half the weight Wow it is actually really light yeah it's probably a similar weight to your upper leg really yeah I'd love to see what it's like inside when it's got all of the other bit yes this is Erin Saunders he's our vice president he also led the design team for the Atlas robot so he can tell you more about the leg so one of the most important things about this leg is that buried in it are hydraulic components underneath this cover on the leg is a series of hydraulic valves and these hydraulic valves take the high-pressure fluid that's generated in the upper body and they redirected into the actuators that make the joints move so the hydraulics is kind of like the muscles for the robot and the valves are what controls those muscles and you can see all these color channels here represent little veins where the fluid routes through the leg so that's quite like the human anatomy there's a lot of similarities and how it looks and the way the fluids move around the robot have a lot of overlap with how we would move fluid around our body yeah many of their robots are inspired by animals the limitations of human form have been removed BigDog their very first robot was designed for the military carrying a heavy payload through terrain that vehicles find impossible and this is their latest creation a hybrid robot with legs and wheels top speed 9 miles per hour range 15 miles this is Alice's cousin handle Wow you can see that there are some similarities with that list I mean this looks similar this sort of looks similar yeah it's a great observation that the upper body is actually borrowed from Atlas so the arms and the torso are basically the same you'll see the arms here we actually mount them to the pelvis and that looks kind of funny but it allows us to do some interesting things so now this big torso is actually free to move back and forth and plays a real critical element for balance so if you think about when you're trying to stand still and someone gives you a little shove if you don't want to step you'll do a lot with your upper body to maintain balance and and handle does the same thing but it can do that without its arms moving around right so its arms are still down pelvis they could be doing manipulation while the upper body is moving around to help with balance great so it still maintains its ability to do something yeah application whilst maintaining its balance yeah but the lower body is entirely new we basically took off the constraints of a human form and said well you know what if we open ourselves up to a human but plus some some machine things like wheels you don't see spinning wheels in Mother Nature but there's no reason we couldn't add a wheel to a leg and get the best of both worlds it's far more stable and far more efficient than the legged things we've done in the past so it's more stable more efficient and it's less complex yeah so that's a big advantage yeah that's really good we think it actually has a lot of potential because it has a long battery life it's very stable it's fast so you know you can think about it working at a rapid rate [Music] it seems like Hahnville is trying to tell us something with that noise what is it yeah what you're hearing right now is the hydraulic pump oh okay so we'll just carry on doing that while it's stationary yeah yeah and that's a fan it's um it's certainly seen some actions yeah yeah it's funny that's that's kind of true with all of our robots you know we have a mentality where we don't take it easy on the robots we don't have a problem with pushing them to the edge to see how stable they are and how they're able to react to the real world the real world isn't a perfect laboratory where you know everything goes as planned do you ever feel like sorry for humble you know when you give it a good push do you feel sorry for it it's funny you know we certainly get that reaction from people sometimes you know when you design these things from the ground up and you know all of the mechanical pieces and the software you know it's a machine so yeah so it's even though it can look especially for Atlas or spot like a person or an animal you know there's no emotions here it's it's all robotics it's all hardware and you know I certainly don't feel bad if I I stop my toaster around a little bit either go give you a washing machine door good show yeah that's right that's right I don't have to go confess after that yeah I have seen some amazing machines here two legged humanoid robots four legged robots that look like animals their latest incarnation combines biology with technology mixing and matching animals humans our own inventions the wheel this may seem unnatural but once you've seen it all it makes complete sense [Music] we're only beginning to understand the potential of this emerging species building robots that mimic humans continues to spark the imagination but now robots have adaptations that follow a very different evolutionary track with mutant hands and hybrid limbs [Music] for me it's been a revelation to understand the origins of our relationship with robots and even why some people really do fear them there is no doubt they have restructured the jobs market and this will continue but the biggest thing has been how fast robots are developing we need to engage in this fascinating phenomenon to make sure that we have the choice over what we want robots to do for all of us [Music] and for me I'm really surprised by what I've discovered so I've spent a little bit of time with robots now and yes I've seen that ok they're not quite as terrifying or as threatening as I maybe first thought but that will change in the next few years physically at least they'll be able to out-compete us in many of the things that we can do but for me the real problem isn't if they move like us or even look like us the real issue will come is that they start to think like us next time we investigate what really distinguishes robots from humans intelligence can robots become our friends this is helping you break down a barrier yeah can we trust them figure if my feet are off my hands are not as good and will they ever become conscious find a cup he's tracking the cup will intelligent robots enhance our lives she will help set up a home for humans on Mars or threaten our survival investigate the past present and future of robots and their effects in our lives go to the address on screen and follow the links to the Open University and to explore more on robots and browse the latest scientific news stories check out BBC learning and the tomorrow's world online hub stay with us now for mechanical marvels clockwork dreams examines the untold story of automata Machine masterpieces built centuries ago to mimic life next [Music]

Channel: Sunandan Verma

Views: 509,217

Rating: 4.6652818 out of 5

Keywords: Robots, robotics, documentry robots, hyper evolution, rise of robots, robot, future of robots, Rise Of The Robots part 1, BBC Documentary, BBC Films, BBC, BBC Robots, Hyper Evolution Rise of the Robot

Id: hRuBZLe8vfs

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 16 2018