The rise of the robots

He can control smart devices in your home, can tell stories to the children, can respond to spoken requests and can even “express emotions with many different facial expressions".

Zenbo, which retails at £410, prompted the Asus chairman, Jonney Shih, to observe at last week’s high-profile launch: “For decades, humans have dreamed of owning such a companion: one that is smart, dear to our hearts, and always at our disposal.”

Next February London's Science Museum launches a major exhibition, Robots, on what it describes as “humanity’s 500-year quest to recreate ourselves in mechanised form.” Among many other exhibits, visitors will be able to see 12 working robots.

The word "robot" itself was only coined in 1920. It comes from the Czech word for "forced labour", and occurred in R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots, a play by Karel ?apek. “?apek thought they would be very organic, indistinguishable from humans, much like the Replicants in Bladerunner,” says Ben Russell, the exhibition’s senior curator. “But then, when they were turned into films, they become these big, broad-shouldered tin-men-type people.”

Here, with Russell’s help, we look at the long tradition of building humanoid robots – a tradition shaped by religious belief, the industrial revolution and dreams about the future.

TALOS

IN Greek mythology, this was a huge automaton, or self-operating machine, fashioned from bronze. Its task was said to be to protect Europa, the mother of King Minos of Crete, from invaders and pirates; it circled Crete’s shores three times every day. According to Adrienne Mayor, on the Wonders & Marvels website, Talos was capable of hurling boulders at passing vessels, including the Argo of Jason and the Argonauts. He could also “heat his bronze body red-hot and then clasp a victim in his arms, hugging and burning him to death.”

JESUS

“THE earliest robots ever built were intended as expressions of religious faith, in the medieval era,” says Russell. “You tended to get them in churches and monasteries. There were lots of automata of Jesus in crucifixion scenes. There was one called the Boxley Rood, or the Rood of Grace, which was kept at Boxley Abbey in Kent; it moved its eyes and turned its head and did all sorts of lifelike movements. A lot of this stuff was smashed up during the Reformation: the Rood itself was ceremonially put on trial in London and was burned at the stake. It was a deeply troubling object for many people.”

THE DEVIL

“If you go to the Castello Sforzesco in Milan," says Russell "they have a wonderful automaton of Satan. It’s amazing. It’s very muscly and sinuous and interesting. On top of it they have a terrifying devil’s head, with boggling eyes and ears. It shrieks, too – there’s an organ inside it. I think it used to have a grindstone in it: the automaton would shriek and spit out sparks, the head would move up and down and the eyes would boggle at you, and you would be scared out of your wits.”

MAN OF IRON

ONE prize exhibit at the Science Museum is an articulated iron manikin, which dates back more than half a century. Standing just six inches high, this intriguing model shows the joints of a skeleton. The museum says the model was possibly used to instruct pupils in limb articulation as well as limb dislocation, injuries to limb joints and way of treating them. The manikin is similar to an illustration in a 1582 book about surgical works, written by Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquadependente (c. 1553-1619), professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, Italy, from 1565.

LADY WITH THE DULCIMER

THE 18th century was something of a golden age for automata, says Russell. In Paris, “you’ll see what’s known as the Dulcimer Player – a wonderful female automata who plays the dulcimer. Neuchatel, in Switzerland, has a wonderful collection of automata, “some of the most advanced machines built at their time, which reproduce human activities such as writing, or playing musical instruments. Their makers did pose questions about the nature of humanity. They also gave their automata these nuanced abilities. The dulcimer player, and some others like her, breathed, occasionally turned to the audience and nodded their heads as if in acknowledgement.”

ERIC

The UK’s first robot, and one of the first in the world, built in 1928 by Captain Richards and A.H. Reffell. Russell describes him as “everything you imagine a robot to be – he was a talking, moving man of steel.” Eric, he adds, was “quintessentially British, and deemed an almost perfect man by the New York press. Audiences were wowed by him, and he charmed dignitaries and celebrities across the world.” But then he disappeared … The museum has currently raised more than £18,000 and hopes to reach a pledged total of £35,000 by the deadline of June 16 to rebuild him. Eric will be on display at the Science Museum in October.

CYGAN

LOOK out for this 1950s robot if you visit the Science Museum next year. Assembled from 300,000 parts and standing eight feet tall, he was created in Italy in 1957 by Dr Ing Fiorito, an engineer and aeromodeller in Turin. He caused a stir when unveiled in this country when he opened the British Food Fair at Olympia in 1958. He could move forwards and backwards, and even danced on the stage with a young woman. In 2013 he broke his reserve price at a Christie’s auction in London, when an un-named buyer successfully bid £17,500 for him.

ELEKTRO

“ELEKTRO, come here … And here he comes, ladies and gentlemen, walking up to greet you, under his own power.” These were the opening words of Elektro’s appearance at the 1939 New York World’s Fair (available on YouTube). This humanoid robot, built by the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, stood seven feet tall and could speak around 700 words; he could also blow up balloons, and smoke cigarettes. He is now on show at the Mansfield Memorial Museum in Mansfield, Ohio, where Westinghouse was also based.

WABOT

TOKYO’S pioneering Waseda University began its robotics research in 1970 with the WABOT project under Professor Ichiro Kato, the father of robot development. WABOT-1, a ‘bipedal humanoid robot’ capable of carrying out simple conversations, was launched in 1973. In 1984 came WABOT-2, which could read a musical score and play an electronic organ. “Rather than a robot for performing fixed tasks in a factory and so on, what we aimed for was a robot that could coexist with human beings and make our lives more convenient and enjoyable,” says Professor Masakatsu G. Fujie, who studied under Professor Kato. Waseda’s ground-breaking work continues to this day.

THE FUTURE

WHAT does the future hold for robots? “People say there’s a robot revolution on its way but my view is it has already happened, without everyone realising it,” says Russell. “Robots already underpin most of our everyday lives. Most of the food you eat will have been packaged by robots; robots build all our cars; when you take money out of a cash machine, or use a self-service check-out, you’re using a robot.

“In the future, I suppose there might be things that incorporate more A.I. [Artificial Intelligence] into them. Whether these will have to take a human form is a subtly different question. When you book a flight or a holiday online you’re actually dealing with a piece of A.I. which is essentially a software robot. I suspect robots in future will take more of these slightly unexpected forms, rather than us having a plague of humanoid robots like you see in Bladerunner. That said, who knows? It is a little bit hard to look into the future.”

* Robots, Science Museum, London, February 8 –September 3, 2017, to be followed by an international tour. To donate to the Eric/Kickstarter appeal before the deadline of June 16, go to sciencemuseum.org.uk/Eric.