She is punctual, tireless, and always looking to learn new skills.
Meet Betty, Britain’s first robotic office manager who has been let loose on an workplace in Milton Keynes to see how well she can integrate with staff.
Programmed with the latest artificial intelligence software, Betty will spend the next two months trundling down corridors and skulking around desks to monitor staff and check environmental conditions.
She will be on hand to greet guests at The Transport Systems Catapult, an innovation hub which came up with the city’s driverless pods. If a fire-door is left open, Betty will know about it and send out an alert. If a stapler or hole-punch is out of place, the offending item will be meticulously logged and its location fed back to handlers.
When most workers have left for the evening, the robot will still be active, making a note of any employees who are burning the midnight oil so that security staff know they are still in the building.
Although it might seem like a dystopian vision of the future of office work, her creators at Birmingham University are hoping the experiment will show that robots can learn in their environments.
She will also be constantly monitoring temperature levels, humidity and noise to make sure that staff are as comfortable as possible.
The team behind Betty have spent the last few weeks using her cameras and scanners to create a map of the area so she knows where she can move.
But she is programmed to learn as she goes. For example if she comes across an unfamiliar object she will take a photograph and email a picture to a member of staff asking for it to be identified.
Dr Nick Hawes, from the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, said she had already won over human staff.
“She’s not spying on anyone, we’ve gone through a lot of ethics committees to get to this point,” he said.
“People are really happy to see her. She says hello to them, and when she can’t open a door they have to help her and she says thank you afterwards.
“We’re really trying to show that robots can learn over long periods in their environment.
“For robots to work alongside humans in normal work environments it is important that they are both robust enough to operate autonomously without expert help, and that they learn to adapt to their environments to improve their performance.”
Betty is part of the £7.2 million EU-funded STRANDS project where robots are learning how to act intelligently and independently in real-world environments while understanding 3D space.
Although Betty’s creators say the programmes are designed to create robots which will ‘clean floors in MacDonalds’ or stocktake experts have warned that jobs will be lost because of AI.
Richard Susskind, an Oxford professor who has advised governments around the world, recently told the Hay Festival that computers will soon outperform even the best professionals. He said: “It’s no longer science fiction. It’s no longer the distant future. In our view a lot of these technologies will be coming through in the 2020s.
“We’re not saying that doctors are going to be replaced overnight, we’re not even saying in the 2020s, but we are saying that the practical impact of artificial intelligence research coming out of research laboratories is remarkable.
“The current professions and the current work of professionals will gradually erode over time because more tasks will be taken over by machines.”
source:telegraph