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Japan's leading robot engineer has called for the development of a standardised robot based on an open-source operating system in order to kick-start the mass production of humanoid robots.

Only when such a standardised “Model-T Robot” is created, said Tomomasa Sato of the University of Tokyo, and work on robots and artificial intelligence is shared by tens of thousands of scientists and innovators across the globe, will the immense challenges of building a truly practical mechanoid begin to be met. However, he warned that this could still take decades.

A Model-T Robot – globally standardised and based on an open-source operating system – could in theory be as transformational for the robot industry as the Model-T Ford was for the auto industry, said Professor Sato, who said that creating that type of machine was among many of the ongoing projects in the university’s Mechano-Informatics department.

Just as the iconic Ford vehicle ushered-in an era where cars became commonplace and hundreds of rival engineers swept into the auto-making business, the Model-T Robot would put an affordable prototype humanoid robot in every artificial intelligence lab, design studio or engineering department that had a bright idea about getting robots to be more useful around the home.

“What needs to happen is the creation of a platform that everyone can easily use and put new software to use on,” said Professor Sato, who doubles as the chairman of the Japan Robot Association. “It would effectively turn the robot into a version of the internet, with everybody adding different softwares and applications and testing them out on the robot itself.”

Mr Sato belongs to a large group of Japanese engineers – many of them attached to large corporations – who believe that the future lies in designing robots to emulate an increasing number of human functions. The work, he warns, will take decades but the effect of opening the field to a much wider base of innovators could be huge.

Masato Hirose, the designer of Honda’s Asimo robot, has devoted the last 20 years to perfecting its ability to walk like a person, constantly adjusting its balance to avoid falling over. The visual effect of Asimo is impressive, and is helpful in stimulating Honda’s own engineers and encouraging young Japanese to take up the subject. But behind it all, he confided, is the true goal that “one day there will be a robot in every home”.

Japan’s rapidly ageing population and low birth rate have provided the country with increasingly visible and alarming evidence of what happens when the number of young people begins to shrink: workforces require more automation and the growing army of elderly people requires too much care for the system to cope with. It is under these circumstances, says Mr Sato, that the concept of servant robots shifts from being an amusing whim to an outright necessity.

Where the Model-T would be transformational to robotics is in the field of artificial intelligence, an area where Japanese robot scientists admit there is currently a gap in their expertise. Mr Hirose, along with other Japanese roboteers, has experienced the huge frustration of not being able to match supremely high-tech mechanical engineering with an equivalently sophisticated “brain”. Thus very conventional tasks, such as assembling a cup, saucer and teaspoon in the correct fashion, have proved extremely complicated to teach even a very mechanically advanced robot.

Although Mr Hirose is not confident that robots will live alongside us within the next few decades, he does believe that huge breakthroughs could come with the development of large-scale quantum computers capable of a much greater volume and speed of calculations than are currently possible with existing semiconductors.

“The robot has to understand a lot about the world around it. If it cannot, it really is useless.”

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