A feel for the future

Research at the

(BRL) could lead to robots with more human-like motion that are safe for people to closely interact with.

The BRL team plans to 'soften' the motion of robots used in everyday tasks that bring them into contact with humans, making them more like us and less like their industrial cousins on the production line.

According to BRL director Prof Chris Melhuish, the laboratory is working on a number of key themes. 'There's a certain paradox if we manufacture robots for service robotics — if a robot is powerful enough to be useful, it is also powerful enough to be dangerous. There are physical and behavioural safety factors, and underlying it all is control,' said Melhuish.

The BRL is a research partnership between the West of England and Bristol universities and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). The robot mechanism being used in the research was designed and built by Bath-based