Let robots take the strain

Robots have the potential to revolutionise peoples’ lives, but Whitehall doesn’t want to fund the research

I met my old friend Deyan Sudjic the other day. He’s the new director of the Design Museum, Butler’s Wharf, East London, with plans to win £70m to establish a bigger, truly world-beating centre for design exhibitions – right next to Tate Modern, with any luck.

I reminded Deyan of the exhibition on robots that the Boilerhouse, forerunner of the Design Museum, had held next to the V&A, back in 1984. An enthusiast for robots since reading Isaac Asimov in the 1960s, I’d co-written a little book on the history and future of robots, to accompany the Boilerhouse show. Deyan now looked quizzical. Robots, he suggested, had decisively moved off the design agenda.

My riposte was ready. Robots, I said, were alive and well in Britain’s factories. All that had happened was that the grippers, sprayers and welders in our car plants had receded in public prominence: on TV, you see a bit of Honda’s very special humanoid gadget, Asimo, but nothing of the machines that made the Fiat Uno ‘handbuilt by robots’. From the point of view of product design, robot capabilities and limitations were as important as ever.

Our discussion moved on. I felt somehow dissatisfied by my reply. Yet the next day came a vindication of sorts.

In an excellent report, the Financial Times effectively indicted Whitehall for the ridiculous stinginess it exhibits with regard to research into domestic robots – machines that perform one or more familiar domestic chores, such as floor-care, or ironing. It described how the EU spends a very modest €180m looking at home robot technologies. And our very own Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council? Its total budget for robots research, over 22 grants, is just £10.4m. Indeed, its most recent grants for six projects totalled a paltry £852,000.

Of course, it’s nowadays very fashionable to point out, with unprecedented insight, that corporate R&D expenditures are no guarantee of satisfactory corporate outcomes – innovations that actually contribute to the bottom line. The elite management consultancy Booz Allen recently published an extensive survey precisely to this effect. Yet the fact is that domestic robots are well worth pouring research cash into. They could have a major impact on old people in their homes over the next 20 years – and it is the over-60s who will multiply the most over that period.

Each year, the UK spends £60bn on the NHS, and the better part of £10bn on purely the R&D component of national defence. On top of the domestic opportunities, the NHS could probably do with more robots – one thinks of lifting patients, and operating theatres. As for defence, it’s one of the few sectors of the UK economy that does sponsor robotics research. But the broader picture for such enquiry is dismal. This country’s Research Councils recently had their budget cut by £68m. There is, as Deyan hinted, no debate about the possibilities of robots, either in public life or even in the UK’s booming design community.

That’s a pity. Even in the world of UK production, robots have extended their influence beyond cars, into the manufacture of food and drink, as well as that of pharmaceuticals. In construction, robots are woefully lacking. And in the home? Back in 1984, my forecasts for domestic robots were properly pessimistic. But since then IT has moved on, to the extent that, over the next 20 years, it has a chance really to look after people.