GDO: Robots exhibition
Our history of making machines in the human image is on display at the Science Museum
The history of robots at the Science Museum.
“Robots reveal some unsettling truths about us — our hopes, fears, dreams and delusions,” said Science Museum director Ian Blatchford at the launch of its Robots exhibition.
They’re also cool — especially when there are 100 collected in one place, as there is in the Science Museum’s exhibition gallery. The impressive collection spans half a millennium, starting with an automaton monk from 1560, designed to walk across a table and raise a crucifix, built as an offering for King Philip II of Spain after his son recovered from an injury.
“It’s the most important collection of humanoid robots ever assembled,” said Blatchford of the exhibition. “It takes the long view, covering 500 years of history. Modern robotics would be impossible without the Renaissance exploration of man as machine, the dazzling automata of the Enlightenment and the complex extremes of science fiction.”
From the praying monk, the exhibition fast-forwards through centuries of man-shaped machines, with highlights including a robotic head that acted as a receptionist at King’s College London in 2013 to a recreation of cybernetic tortoises made in 1951. The latter could avoid obstacles and find their charging huts when they were low on batteries — not too dissimilar to a modern Roomba.
The Science Museum is particularly proud of Eric, its Kickstarter-funded reconstruction of Britain’s first robot. Built in 1928, the metal man took the place of an apparently double-booked Duke of York at a speech. Eric was limited to bowing, looking around and delivering prepared remarks, but toured the globe for years.
There are also film props, including a replica of Maria from Metropolis and the T-800 from Terminator Salvation — very different cinematic takes on robots. PC Pro readers shouldn’t miss George, a robot built by Tony Sale, co-founder of the National Museum of Computing, from scrap metal and controlled via Morse code.
Not all the machines get up and move around — thankfully in the case
Eric was limited to bowing, looking around and delivering prepared remarks, but toured the globe for years
of the Terminator prop — but 16 of the robots are switched on. Visitors can interact with some, particularly newer models such as the REEM Service Robot, which features a touch panel and can, apparently, dance. The most impressive is Engineered Arts’ Robo-Thespian, which delivers a theatrical performance every 20 minutes, while the creepiest is the uncanny valley Kodomoroid, a human-looking news reader.
The exhibition is at times amusing — particularly the machine designed to just turn itself off, made to express the limits of programming — and at times disconcerting, including the display of skulllike faces with eyes that follow you. It highlights the difference between programmed machines and intelligent robots, and the gap between them and us.
Admission costs £15 for adults and is free for kids under seven. Robots runs at the Science Museum until September, before moving on to Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, Newcastle’s Life Science Centre in 2018 and Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland in 2019. Head to sciencemuseum.org.uk.