Held during the latest ERL Robotics Competition in Milton Keynes, the Smart City Robotics Symposium brought together specialists in robotics, public services, policy, and innovation to explore different aspects of building smart city services. A key focus was to address the challenges faced by robotic systems operating in real-world environments. The event was free, open to the public and held in a central square within Centre:MK, the main shopping complex at the heart of Milton Keynes city centre, and also the setting for the Smart City Robotics Competition. In this way, the organisers demonstrated their willingness to engage the public in an everyday setting where people meet and gather.
The discussion was moderated by tech-friendly education consultant and author Beverly Clarke MBE. Panel members were: Duncan Russell, head of collaborations at Smart City Consultancy, Radhika Gudipati, robotics specialist at UK research funding agency ARIA; Simon Burfield, head of innovation at Compsoft Creative; Sophie Lloyd, head of economic development at Milton Keynes City Council, and Laura Hawkins, technology manager at Excelerate Technology Group.
The opening question – What are the benefits of robots? – and the panelists’ diverse backgrounds led to a broad range of answers, tailored to allow for a largely public audience. Robots are great for dark environments and dangerous, dirty jobs (Simon). They can also be used in hostile environments such as bomb disposal or negotiation situations (Laura). For Sophie, the benefits were less about the tech and more about the solution: “You can’t be in MK without talking about the Starship delivery vehicles, a common sight around the city. We saw their benefit during the pandemic. They also save a huge amount of carbon emissions, too. These are quantifiable benefits.” Simon added an example where robots can perform dull, repetitive tasks, freeing up human workers to carry out more valuable jobs.
As another example, Duncan mentioned the Ohmio autonomous, ‘driverless’ shuttle that had been ferrying passengers on the streets of Milton Keynes during the day, albeit with a safety driver on board. He added that autonomous vehicles can work by themselves and perform various tasks, from tackling weeds and de-icing paths to carrying out inspections and gathering information. A large part of the Smart City ERL robotics competition itself was about exploring and overcoming the challenges that robots face in real-world settings, such as manipulating a door and passing through it or interacting with humans in a coffee shop.
Broadening the scope, Radhika said that the tech community had a responsibility to ensure wider society understands what robots can do, for example in healthcare, and to challenge scare stories about robots. She advocated: “Utopia rather than dystopia! There are lots of examples of how robots can help us. The tech community needs to go out and tell the wider community about the benefits of robots.”
The discussion moved on. What was the biggest single challenge affecting widespread adoption of robots across society?
For Duncan it was: “the regulatory landscape – it needs to be there for safety but it shouldn’t hold back development and innovations.” Radhika agreed that adoption was a key challenge. Among the factors that created barriers to adoption was ease of use or a lack of it: “There is no one challenge but if asked to name one I would say, simplify gadgets so people at large can use them.” It was also about “normalising the tech”, said the moderator, Beverly, whose published works for children aim to do exactly that. Simon picked up this theme: “We need to educate the user. People just don’t know what robots are capable of doing. We need to show people how robots do tasks.”
Laura cited a lack of available finance as a barrier to adoption: “It’s the risk. I don’t mean the risk of a robot uprising(!) but adoption investment risk – the money and the time needed to learn and co-create with the inventor.”
As if to anticipate the next question, Sophie brought the focus in more locally by adding that public authorities can play a role in enabling innovation to happen: “MK is a testament to the fact that you can trial things here. We’re also lucky to have a public that expects innovation.”
The discussion stayed with Milton Keynes. What was it about the city that made it such a fertile ground for robots and smart city innovations?
“There’s lots of space,” said Sophie. “The layout of the city is hugely helpful for trials. It’s a real-world testbed. Plus the public mentality – there’s a willingness here to try new things.” Duncan agreed, before crediting other factors, too: “It’s the physical environment and the road layout. We can trial a useful service. There’s excellent connectivity between shops and houses, also the presence and involvement of Cranfield and Milton Keynes Universities, and MK College’s talent and expertise, plus a supportive city council.”
The autonomous shuttle was also being trialled at other UK locations. There were plans to expand the service including beyond transport, too: “We’ve done a lot of work on connectivity, monitoring, safety, teleoperation, risk, etc. We see it as ‘autonomy as a service’, not just a single service. We keep on making improvements. So we have plans to expand the shuttle service and also to introduce smaller robots on the ‘redways’ (Milton Keynes is well-known for its network of distinctive red-tarmac pedestrian and cycle paths) for de-icing and weeding. We need to make sure it’s safe for path users first.”
The discussion returned to finance and investment. Scaling up and bringing robots into cities is costly. What kind of partnership or collaboration models were the panel considering?
Answers varied, from collaborations between several small, specialist companies providing individual services to the need for both government funding and private sector partnerships. As robotics specialist at ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency), Radhika captured the essence of speculative research investment: “We fund research. Sometimes it doesn’t lead to anything, but sometimes it leads to a breakthrough. We’re trying to create ‘translation pathways’ to bring in venture capitalists, so the research doesn’t just gather dust but leads to useful applications.”
There is a cultural dimension, too. In a commercial environment, players need to be competitive, but in the post-research technology transfer arena there’s a need to find the ‘sweet spot’ between competing and working together. Laura captured this point: “What’s important is that all the partners need to share the same aims. We need the private sector to be less competitive, more collaborative to move this forward.”
The discussion moved on briefly to drones, whether for national security, nuclear security, in healthcare emergencies and hospital delivery (blood, samples) or for building inspection. The potential benefits are plentiful. However, the use of drones is heavily regulated, with a concern for safety placing a major constraint on their wider adoption.
The same was true for the driverless shuttle. “Regulation is the complication,” said Sophie, speaking for the city council. “At the moment we have to have safety drivers, but we’re working so the vehicles can connect with traffic lights.” Duncan echoed this: “We’re still running trials moving towards a full service. We’re getting lots of support from the city council. We have three shuttles running today. We don’t have a licence yet. We’re still trying to convince bus operators that this is the future.”
There was a question about the ‘super high value’ of intellectual property (IP) to be had in tech innovations, and how IP can best be developed so that these innovations can be exported and achieve their true commercial value. In the UK, a common national lament is that British innovations often fall short at precisely this commercial scale-up stage. It was clear that this struck a chord for some panellists.
“The UK is at the forefront of innovation but we lose at the next stage of scaling up and leveraging the benefits,” said Radhika. “Creating the IP, we can compete with any country in the world but scaling up to large corporates, we are losing out. The start-up eco-system [in the UK] is still quite risk averse compared to other countries.” Simon cited his past experience in the research lab at a major mobile phone operator: “We were great at prototypes but the cost of industrialisation is huge and everyone else catches up.” Not for the first time in the discussion, Laura summed it up neatly: “We have ideas but we don’t have the money to build them.”
Questions followed: if an entrepreneur has money to invest, what’s the path to a return on investment (ROI)? What is investable today?
“Whatever you build, you have to prove you have a market for it. If there’s no buy-in, don’t pursue it,” advised Simon. Radhika added that it can be easier to show a path to ROI for software projects, less so for hardware projects. Duncan was under no illusions: “Robotics is hard, it’s expensive. You need hardware and software so there are two lots of development. You still need hardware to collect the data.”
After some brief thoughts about the potential offered by smart technology in daily lives, from seamless health care and continuous health monitoring to smart hospitals and other buildings, the panel were asked how technology can be used to serve citizens equitably?
Sophie’s perspective was one of inclusivity: “We have to think about both urban and rural environments. We will go at the speed that the citizens go. We also need to think about groups that may not always be considered.” Duncan cited the need to factor inclusivity in at the design stage: “We try to design as much as we can to be equitable. We do lots of different trials to see where the system doesn’t work. We have a shuttle lift. The shuttle doesn’t serve every type of person but we still have opportunities to broaden access.” He highlighted the risks of not gathering user feedback broadly: “Designing in our own experience alone leads to inherent bias – it’s hard to be fully inclusive.”
Seeking the panel’s thoughts about AI, a member of the audience revealed his own ambiguous feelings: “The spread of AI scares me but it also amazes me. Where should we place our bets in the AI race?”
Simon: “AI can do amazing things but it can also hallucinate or miss things. We still need to check it. AI in robotics is a different and much harder environment. Humanoids are amazing hardware but the software is not there yet.” Laura saw the potential of AI in healthcare: “In the future, AI-assisted cancer surgery would be incredible. A mix of human and artificial intelligence that will cure cancer and do things we couldn’t do in the past.” Radhika took a ‘warts and all’ view: “We know computers can calculate much faster than us. With AI we are now transitioning. We know there are errors but I like to be more optimistic about the future.” Duncan was also positive: “We’re now learning what AI can do. It’s growing fast. There have been some really big leaps in capability and we are reaping the benefits, so AI is not running off in the wrong direction.”
The panel’s final comments focused on trust and on spreading the word about robotics and AI. Duncan mentioned a funding programme for research into trustworthy autonomous systems and on the need for the AI/robotics community to work with social scientists. In experiments, things fail, but it’s important that they fail in a safe way so trust is not lost: “Reliability is one thing, trust is another.” To build trust, robots need to be seen with people going about their daily lives, interacting with them. Duncan mentioned an example where robots and musicians are improvising together, and a YouTube clip in which pets in a cat hotel can be seen playing with robots. “There are experiments with trustworthiness. We need to do more work on this, bringing trials out into the real world. If it fails in a trustworthy way, we can live with that.”
And that was it, or almost. In all, a wide-ranging discussion that fully justified its allotted 90 minutes. Questions from the audience had been thoughtful and the panel had given good value with their responses. The evening’s final message was a simple appeal from Laura to everyone in the room to spread the word: “Go out and share one thing that you’ve learned tonight with another person.”