Original subtitles

Tonight, we'll be assembling the world's greatest robot orchestra and explaining

how simple motors will allow these machines to perform alongside human

musicians. Welcome to the Christmas Lecture.

A robot.

Automated machines that use simple motors and clever software to copy the

done by humans.

And they're getting smarter all the time.

Take a look at these little fellas here.

Robotic acrobat that can balance on a tight rope.

Or our six -legged robot spider here that can shift its weight to stay

upright.

Just like a human can.

But what about something slightly more complicated?

What about a musical instrument?

I could do this, but I don't think you can do this.

Well, we'll see if you can do it later on. Let's see.

Now, if you've seen any of my earlier lectures, you'll know that I've been

setting myself a grand challenge each time. And tonight is no different.

The first person to achieve continuous movement with electricity and

the first electric motor, which is essential for all robots to function,

Royal Institution's very own Michael Faraday.

Now, he was fascinated with the relationship between electricity and

And tonight, I want to honour his work.

So let's do something amazing with motors that Michael Faraday could never

imagined in 1821.

So drum roll, please.

Very good.

Tonight, we are going to construct the world's greatest robot orchestra.

Now, the sound of an orchestra playing in perfect harmony, to me...

represents the pinnacle of human achievement.

So the question is, can robots replicate this?

Over the past few months, engineers from across Europe have been building robot

musicians.

And tonight, we've set them the ultimate challenge to play the Doctor Who theme

tune.

Now, some members of our ensemble have used hack technology from around the

to make the music.

Others have programmed and trained to play much more traditional instruments.

And they'll all be accompanied by real living members of the London

Orchestra.

Honestly, this truly is going to be great.

So let's break down our problem into steps to build up our orchestra.

We need to break down the tune into its components for the Doctor Who theme

tune. So first thing we need is the rhythm section, the drums.

Then we need that low bass synth sound, so we need some synthesizers.

Then let's add some guitars into that.

But then we need the melody for our Doctor Who theme tune.

And we also need a keyboard in the tune.

And then, for a bit of fun, let's make one of our instruments fly.

Now, one thing all of these robots have in common is that they'll all be relying

on the simple relationship between electricity, magnetism, and movement. So

that's where I'm going to start.

This is the world's first motor.

And it was demonstrated in this lecture theatre by...

michael faraday over 200 years ago and charlotte who is the curator of

collections at the ri has very kindly brought this in for us now it's so

that nobody's allowed to touch it apart from charlotte so thank you very much

for bringing this in charlotte so andy has very kindly built a replica for us

well

Now, Faraday knew that if he could run a current through a wire, this would

create a magnetic field around that wire.

So if we place the wire next to the magnet with a magnetic field running

perpendicular or at right angles to the one created around the wire, the wire

would move.

But the movement would break the circuit, so we couldn't really get

movement until he remembered Mercury.

But before we get this mercury out, I think we should get the real fragile one

out of the way. So thank you very much, Charlotte.

Now, Andy's going to pour the mercury around the magnet.

Then we can dip this metal needle that Andy has here into the mercury.

and we can pass an electric current through it.

So we can just use a normal power supply to pass the electric current through

it.

And then what we should see is rotation.

So the mercury metal conducts electricity, but it also allows the

which at room temperature, the mercury is a liquid, So the objects can move

freely through that.

And there we are. We have rotation.

And it just keeps moving round and round because there is liquid in there which

allows that continuous movement.

But of course, in modern motors, we use brushes instead of that mercury.

But thank you very much for your help there, Andy.

Now, most of us still work on this principle, and you can even try building

yourself.

You can make one actually out of a battery, a magnet, and a coil of wire.

And I'm going to come and sit next to you, if that's all right, to come and do

this. So shift you along, everybody.

That's enough, I'm not that big.

Okay, now this is a really simple one that you're going to help me with. Okay,

so what's your name? Lucy. Lucy, okay.

So what we have here, Lucy, is a battery.

a magnet and a coil, nice and simple.

So what I want you to do is just put that battery on top of that magnet.

Okay, you see it's a very strong magnet.

So that magnet can set up a magnetic field.

Then we have our coil here, and if we place our coil over the top

of that battery, it will generate a current, an electrical current through

coil.

So the wire sets off a separate magnetic field, which runs perpendicular, or at

right angles, to our magnetic field here.

And the result is that the two fields react with each other, and our coil

rotates.

Okay? Got it, Lucy?

So, place our coil over the top. There we are.

Then it goes round nice and fast.

Thank you.

In a moment, I'm going to be introducing you to the first robot in our

orchestra. But just before I do, I want to show you a hack that we did with the

most common robot of them all.

Now, you might not think your washing machine is a robot.

But actually, it's just a collection of motors that replicates the manual work

of having to wash your clothes by hand.

So on a much more basic level, it turns electricity into movement.

So if it's possible to turn electricity into movement, can we turn movement into

electricity?

Well, a few weeks ago, I challenged Andy to build a wind turbine and generate

electricity using an old washing machine.

Now, this isn't as stupid as it sounds.

When you put your power into your washing machine, you get movement. The

spins. So if you spin the drum...

Surely you can get power out.

So, Andy, how did you get on?

Not too bad, not too bad. I didn't use too many of the bits of the washing

machine in the turbine, as you can see, littered around here. But the main bit,

obviously, is the motor. This is the main motor that turns the drum in the

washing machine.

And like you said, if we can use something else to turn the motor, it

generate electricity. So we're going to be trying to use these turbine blades to

turn the motor.

to try and generate some electricity.

Okay, how much electricity?

Maybe not all that much. This probably isn't the most efficient way to generate

electricity in the world, but we should be able to get some light out of these

torches on the front here. Right, okay, so these we need to keep an eye out, is

it? Right, so we need to test it.

Now, of course, it doesn't get that windy in the lecture theatre, so Andy,

conveniently, has brought his leaf blower with him.

So it might get a bit blustery over here, so hang on to your heads,

Okay, so are we ready?

So everybody keep an eye out on those lights.

So let's test it, Andy. Okay.

spinning, and the lights came on. So we made a wind turbine from a washing

machine. Now, as Andy said, it's not the most efficient way to power your home,

but it does show that relationship between electricity, magnetism, and

really well. Excellent work, Andy. Thank you very much.

A little bit more about motors. We can start assembling our robot musicians.

So let's start simple with the drums.

Well, maybe not so simple, but you only have to worry about the rhythm because

on the drums the pitch doesn't change.

So all we really need is a single motor to play each drum, like this snare drum.

So attached to each drumstick is a motor that will connect the circuit so that

the motor makes the stick hit the drum.

And bounce back again. So I should be able to just keep hitting that drum with

every signal.

Like so.

Brilliant.

But our orchestra isn't going to work by me standing here pressing a switch. So

we need to program that tune.

For a human orchestra, we'd use sheet music.

Which has a line for the bass.

The synth and the strings and of course one for the drums as well.

Now sheet music is similar actually to a computer program in that it tells the

musicians what notes to play, how long to hold each note and how long they

should play it for.

Now let me show you a robot that uses some very simple instructions to do

something very, very cool.

Remember these?

Has anyone ever tried solving a Rubik's Cube?

Oh, lots of people.

There you are then. You can have that one. Try solving that.

And someone over here, you try solving that one.

I need this one, I'm afraid.

Okay, now, you should have solved it by now, yes? How are you getting on?

No? Not quite?

Okay, well, keep going.

Now it might seem impossible to solve, but mathematicians have shown that you

can solve any cube within just 20 moves.

Because there's a certain pattern of twists and turns that would get the cube

back to normal. So all of the colours on the side would be the same.

Now the inventors of this robot set themselves a challenge.

This is CubeStormer 3.

And it's the quickest cube solver in the world.

So how long do you think it would take to solve this?

How long?

10 or 20 seconds.

Yep, any advance?

10, 20 to 30 seconds.

Okay, well, let's see.

I just align my Rubik's Cube.

And if Dave, you just want to come and have a look at this.

I press my go button.

Wow.

Four seconds.

I know it looks magic, but actually it's Lego and a smartphone.

Now it takes photographs of the cube.

And the software works out the quickest way in which to solve these Rubik's

Cubes. So it writes a program to tell each robot arm which way to turn.

And then actually, once the math is done, it's just a simple list of

instructions. So spin this part of the cube, rotate that part, spin the other

face.

Now the same is true for our robot drummer.

Now he's from Queen Mary's University of London, and here he is.

Say hi to Motima.

Hi, Motorman.

Hi.

Now, we need to write a program to know exactly when each motor will turn on to

create the rhythm.

Now, the easiest way to do this is a form of electronic sheet music called

or Musical Instrument Digital Interface.

And it's been designed specifically so that instruments can talk to the

and back again.

So, instead of writing a whole new program,

we can take the drum from our sheet music, write it in MIDI software, which

then convert it into instructions for Mortimer.

So if we sent a simple code to the drummer, we should hear this.

Okay, nice and simple.

But we could send a more complex code that repeats a certain rhythm, and we'd

hear this.

Excellent. Okay, already we're starting to rock and we just have one.

Now, in fact, all our robots are going to be controlled by MIDI, as it means we

can work in a format that humans can read, which is sheet music, and then

convert it straight into code that our robot musicians are much more

with.

Okay, so one musician down, lots more to go.

Because we don't just need a rhythm in our piece.

We also need pitch.

So we need to start with that low bass synthesizer sound.

You know the one for Doctor Who? Who knows it?

Sing it, everybody.

Not bad, not bad. I hope the robot orchestra are as good as you guys.

So, we need another robot that can read music and adjust the pitch of the sound

as it produces it.

Now, in the spirit of making and hacking and repurposing, this robot musician is

made from a device that was made redundant many years ago.

Now, in the days before laser and inject printers, documents were printed by

very noisy dot matrix printers.

which had to punch a letter shape through the ink -covered ribbon onto

Now, we don't really think about printers as robots, but they use motors

replicate human work, or at least the hundreds of monks that used to copy

So, if we set it printing, we'll hear the motors whirring away and changing

pitch. But we're not interested in what's being printed.

We just want to hear how the sound changes.

So the owner of this has hacked it, and he realized that he could alter the

pitch of the sound by printing different patterns.

So it accepts our MIDI code.

So the computer in the printer converts into instructions telling different

motors when to move.

So it sounds like this. Let's see if you can guess the tune.

Anyone guess it?

Anyone guess it?

Yeah.

Oh, to joy. Well done, yes. And well done if you knew that at home as well.

Now, our orchestra is starting to take shape.

Robots can convert MIDI into motorized movement.

And there's a much more sophisticated breed of printer that's starting to

increase in popularity.

and may prove very useful as we move to the next instrument in our orchestra.

Finishing off the rhythm section of our unconventional orchestra is a bass

guitar, which has been adapted to play itself for students at the University of

Leeds.

So like our earlier instruments, it reads our MIDI program, but this uses

solenoids and compressed air to press down on the strings.

And then it adjusts the pitch of the notes played when the actuator plucks

strings. So just like a human guitarist would.

So let's hear what our bass guitar sounds like.

Wow.

Whoa.

The team who put this together wanted to give the guitar an even more human

-like feeling, so it gave it fingers.

Now, the solution for these fingers was to print them using a 3D printer, which

is quite similar to this one that we have.

Now, we have to be very careful with this because it's halfway through making

model.

And it's making a model of someone in the audience.

So Isla, would you like to come and join me?

Hi, Isla. How are you?

Okay, so let's just go around here so we can see what's going on, Isla.

So a few weeks ago, we sent some people to Isla's house to get a 3D scan of her

head.

And now, we can see people scanning your head there. That must have been very

strange for your Isla, wasn't it?

So, the head is being printed layer by layer.

So, each of these layers can be seen as a thinly sliced horizontal cross

-section of Isla's head.

Now, 3D printing is just a rapid prototyping process, which is capable of

making... three -dimensional solid objects from a digital file.

Now, to buy a 3D printer is actually still quite expensive.

But if you have a design, there are companies that will print one for you,

in the same way people print your photographs.

So, as you can see, this would take a very long time to start printing Isla's

head now.

So we have printed one a little earlier.

So are you ready for this, Isla?

Wow!

What do you think, Isla?

I think that looks great. What do

you think, Isla?

I think it's good.

It looks fantastic. I did have my hair up at the time. You did have a ponytail

in at the time, did you? Good.

We're glad.

Well, the extra special thing here is that your book...

is going to go into the Royal Institution downstairs next to Michael

bus. How good is that?

Okay. I'm done.

All right. Thank you very much, Alan.

Thank you.

Now, printing colourful fingers is fun for our bass guitar, but is there a more

serious application for our 3D printing?

Well, yes.

And hopefully, we have a video call here with Hayley Fraser in Inverness.

Now, hi, Hayley.

How are you?

Hi. Good, good. Now, Hayley, I understand you have a prosthetic hand

3D printed. Is that right?

Yeah. Yeah? And can you show us it?

Fantastic.

Do you want to give us a wave?

That's brilliant. Now, this must be life -changing for you, is it?

Yeah.

I really like the colour, Hayley, the pink colour. Did you choose that?

Yes. You did, yes.

OK. Now, can you show us something with the hand? Maybe pick something up.

So, Hayley's dad... When did Hayley get this

hand? Hayley received it back in June this year.

It took around six weeks for the whole process, which was a very quick

turnaround. Wow, that's amazing.

It must have made Hayley's life just so different, did it?

Oh, yes, right on out, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing that really impresses me most about this is

prosthetic hands can cost literally thousands of pounds.

But this one is so low cost that it means that as Hayley grows, then the

can always be the right size for Hayley as well.

Yeah. And that must be life -changing in itself.

Yeah, of course. We can actually buy 3D printers for our home, which we can

actually print the parts for ourselves.

That's fantastic. So you can actually print your own hands at home then as

Yes. So it means you can choose what colour you want as well, Hayley.

Yes, that's great.

OK, well, thank you very much for joining us and happy holidays to you.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye -bye.

Now, our orchestra is starting to take shape.

We can have a drummer, a bassist and a printer. Let's not forget our lovely

printer.

While these robot musicians will get away with playing the right notes in the

right order, some instruments are much, much harder to play.

Now, we want a robot to play the solo part in Doctor Who. Who knows the solo

part in Doctor Who?

Sing it.

Someone down here is very, very good.

Excellent.

If it all goes wrong later, I might just get you to do that, okay?

Now, we want them to play it on one of these, a theremin. And they are

notoriously difficult to play.

Because you have to play in mid -air.

So you can hear some sort of strange noise.

And on the left hand, I can control the volume.

And then my right hand can control the pitch.

Well, I've definitely not perfected it yet, so I hope the robot does a lot

better than me.

One of the things that makes this especially hard to play is that to keep

tune, you have to position your hands in exactly the right place in the air.

If the theremin is nudged or the settings are different, you'd have to

reposition your hands.

So you have to listen to the sound that's being produced, think whether

tune, and then think, do I need the pitch higher or lower, and then move

hands accordingly.

Now this is called a feedback loop.

And this is what our theremin -playing robot will need to master.

Now, to show you what I mean about a feedback loop, I need a volunteer to

me with the 20 whistle.

Okay, you there with the necklace on? Yeah, okay, come down.

Let's see. Okay, let's see. Right.

What I want you to do, here's your swanee whistle.

I'm going to turn away from you and play a note.

And then I want you to try and replicate that note.

Okay?

Got it?

Keep going.

Oh, I think you've just about got it there, yeah.

But it's quite difficult, isn't it?

But actually what you were doing there was a feedback loop.

So I gave you a note, you were trying to listen to what that note was, and then

you were adjusting your hands and the sound accordingly so you hit the same

as me. But it's quite difficult, isn't it? Yeah, you did very well. Thank you

very much.

Now this rather cute little robot is programmed to follow a very simple

loop.

So when I set it running, what we need is for it to follow a white line.

So we just have some white line on a tape around the theatre.

Now the program we've written is a nice simple one.

So if I set this running on the line,

we can see it start to move.

So the program is written. It's very simple.

At the front of that robot is an infrared light and a sensor.

Now, when the light flashes, the amount of light reflected back is measured by

that sensor.

So if the sensor is over the white line, there's a high value, and the computer

tells the motor to move the robot forward.

If it's over the black, the amount of light reflected is too low.

So the computer tells the motors to move the robot left or right and find that

white line again.

And each of these is a feedback loop.

We have an action.

The robot moves.

There's a measurement with the sensor.

The robot reacts and it changes what it's doing.

And you can even see it's just gone round a little corner there. So I think

might just let it keep going.

What do you think?

Let's see how far it goes.

Okay, well, we've got a camera mounted to the front of it, so we'll just follow

its progress and we'll pick up with it later on.

Now, our more advanced robot, like the one capable of playing a theremin, can't

really be programmed in this way.

Our little line -following robot knows what it's likely to encounter, so we can

tell it exactly how to react.

But what happens if you place a robot in an unpredictable alien world without a

big white line to follow?

In a place where communication is almost impossible and robots have to deal with

the challenges themselves.

So on the surface of Mars, for example.

So please give a very warm welcome to Abby Hutty and Bruno.

So, Abby, you've heard about our challenge to make a most advanced robot

theremin. Now, you're part of a team that's building a much, much more

complicated robot.

So, what do we have here?

This is Bruno. This is one of our prototype rovers for the 2018 Mars

that's the European Space Agency's first rover mission to Mars.

So Bruno here's a prototype, so that means he's a working model, and he helps

to develop things like how we're going to drive around on Mars, and also how

we're going to actually autonomously navigate, so how we're going to work out

where we want to travel when we're on Mars.

Fantastic. Now, I know tonight that Paul is actually controlling him for us in

the lecture theatre, but I'm guessing that's not what's going to happen when

he's on Mars.

Yeah, so in the lecture theatre it's pretty dark in here, and the rover is

designed to be able to see...

and get the right kind of contrast on Mars during the daytime.

So he can't really work out things in the dark.

So we're actually having to control him by Wi -Fi, which is great.

We're just remote controlling him, but we can't do that when we're on Mars

because Mars is so far away that it would take up to 22 minutes for the

to get there just to tell them what to do. So if you're driving around on Mars

and you hit the stop button...

That's a bit too long, really.

So we have to make our rover intelligent enough to make its own decisions about

what it can and can't do safely and drive around all by itself.

Brilliant. So you're almost like giving it coordinates that you might give a car

GPS? Yeah, it's a bit like that. We can give it a destination that it's got to

go to. It can be up to two days' drive, and it'll just look at what's in front

of it. It can bring up an elevation map, which is basically a picture of what's

in front of it in three dimensions.

And then it can do calculations to work out...

what's too big an obstacle to climb over and what's safe for it to trundle over

and then just pick its own route to that destination, phone us up. I think we

have that here, yeah. So this is an elevation map. So this shows us there's

big rock in front of us here that would be too big to climb over, but all of the

blue area, that's nice and safe.

Nothing's too big, so we can just drive straight over that.

Right, okay. So the other thing I'm noticing here, Abi, is that these

they don't have the normal rubber on them like you would on tyres.

And so they're all metal, so they're very noisy. Why is that?

Okay, so the primary objective of the rover mission is to look for life on

either in the past or present living life.

And rubber comes from trees. It's a natural substance.

So if we were to take rubber tires with us, that could contaminate the samples

that we're looking at. And we could find Earth life in that rubber and think

that it was life on Mars.

So we've got to make sure that nothing that we take with us is going to

contaminate Mars. We've got to develop these flexible wheels so that you still

get the same kind of traction and grip going over rocks and going through sand

as you would with a rubber tyre.

but without anything organic inside it. Wow, okay, that sounds like a tremendous

project.

Thank you. And all of this technology that you're developing here will be on

ExoMars rover, is that right? Absolutely, yes. So we're developing

bits and pieces, lots of different prototypes that test different things,

will all come together in our final rover that launches in 2018.

That's fantastic.

Well, thank you so much, Abby, for bringing this along, and the very best

luck with this fantastic project.

Thank you. Thank you.

Absolutely incredible.

And to play our theremin in our orchestra, our robot will need the

Bruno, that Mars rover.

Because Abby didn't tell Bruno exactly how to get to its destination.

She just tells him where to go, and he was working out the rest.

So in the same way, we need to be able to tell our theremin player which note

hit, and it must make a judgment as to what the note might be.

Then it listens to the sound that's being produced and makes adjustments to

that perfect pitch, just as we were doing with the swanny whistles earlier.

And here is our solution.

We're back with our H5W.

And he's such a cute machine, isn't he?

It's modelled on a three -year -old. And it lives in Barcelona in Spain. And

it's travelled here together with several friends, including...

Paul Frasier and Vicky Valutz from SPECS Research Group at the Catalan Institute

of Advanced Studies at the University Pompidou Fabra.

Welcome.

Hi, it's IW.

My name is H5W. I am like a robot.

Paul is my friend and we love to be here.

Brilliant. Now, Paul, why would you need such a complicated robot?

Well, the iCub robot, this one called H5W, has about 60 motors.

Like many of the robots we saw can do one thing.

But if you look at their own bodies, we can do more than one thing.

On the other hand, if you now really want to advance robots and make a robot

that really can be our friend, that can work with us and we can relate to, then

we might have to think about giving them more of the property that we have. And

it does feel really human -like. When it turns around and looks at you and winks

at you and things, it does feel very, very human -like. So let's see what it

do with these hands.

So H5W, can you do something?

Let's play with the piano.

That sounds like a good idea.

Okay, so why don't you play a C?

Can you play a C for us?

Well, that was almost right. And we have been practicing this the whole

afternoon, you know, so I'm a little bit disappointed.

It's like a naughty three -year -old. Look, H5W, can we try this again? And

in mind, it's being recorded. Lots of people are watching. Can you try to do

right this time?

Well done.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, I agree with that.

So we've been talking about feedback loops and how we need that for our

orchestra. So this is a very sophisticated feedback loop plus the one

further from that as well, isn't it? Well, this is the whole point. If you

at our brain, it's actually managing different kinds of feedback loops at the

same time.

You can think about brains like a prediction machine.

It's not only getting errors from the world, as in the line -following robot,

oh, I'm off, now I have to correct.

It's like a feedback error.

But it's really also predicting, like, oh, what should the world look like when

I'm doing things? So it's highly relying, and on the same point as robot,

predictions it's making about the world it's in.

And we'd need that if we were able to coexist with robots as well. Absolutely.

So we'd like to hear a tune from it. I think we'd like to hear a tune, wouldn't

we? Yeah?

All right.

Let's see what it can play.

This is not really difficult.

How about this?

What do we think? I think that was starting to sound like something. What

think it was?

Twinkle, twinkle, little star. It sounded a bit like that, didn't it?

Excellent. Correct.

Well done.

Correct. Well done.

So it sounds like H5W could be the star of our heroin playing later on. So thank

you very much for showing this poll, and thank you very much, H5W.

Well done. Thank you.

So I'm looking forward to hearing H5W play our solo part on the theremin later

on.

Now, by using constant feedback loops, we're now one step closer to completing

our orchestra.

So, how's our line following robot getting on?

Can we see any? Oh, yeah, we can see some footage of him. Excellent.

Okay, so you can see him actually going around quite a tight corner there.

That's quite difficult to do. So he's definitely outside of the lecture

and somewhere in the RI there, I think.

But I think we should just put some tape down outside the RI and just let him

walk around London, see what's going on.

Now, next, we want to work out how to bring several robots to play together.

After all, a good orchestra is much more than the sum of its parts.

Now, to give you an idea of how robots work together, I want to introduce you

a swarm of robots.

These rather cute little things here are pixel bots, and they're being developed

by Disney Research and ETH Zurich.

And they're tiny two -wheeled robots that have LEDs.

so that they can light up and make shapes.

So to tell me more about these, please welcome developer Paul Beardsley.

So thank you very much for joining us, Paul. Now, these pixel bots have started

swarming together in the middle, but they're going to start a performance for

us. I understand. Is that right?

That's right.

This is a swarm of robots that can make images and animations.

And what we're about to see is the story of the universe as told by the pixel

bots all in two minutes.

Okay. So the way to think of it is each robot is like one pixel, and what we've

got here is a display with 50 pixels.

Okay. So we're seeing something happening here, Paul. What's going on?

So now we're seeing the story of the universe told by the pixel bots, and it

started with the Big Bang, and now we've gone to the solar system, an

abbreviated version. Here's the sun, here's the earth, and here's the moon.

what we're going to see is a fish appear, and then a dinosaur, and then a

And that's the history of the universe in an abbreviated form.

History of the universe by pixel bots. Brilliant.

And do they, I see there's a couple of them colliding. Do they often collide?

Well, this is one of the things we've worked on, is collision avoidance. So if

you've got a swarm of robots, you want them to go out into the world. You don't

want them to collide with each other or with people.

These are little robots, and so we forgive them if they make a few

you will see a few collisions happen. Yes, absolutely. So how are they

communicating? I notice you've got some antennas just over here as well.

Yes, that's right. So the way this system works is there's a camera above

and that's connected to this computer.

And the computer, it knows the images we want to create. It's also computing the

collision avoidance. And it then sends wireless commands here, and they go to

each individual robot. So we're saying, robot one, go here. Robot two, go here,

and so on. Excellent. And we're seeing a dinosaur here.

That's our dinosaur, yeah. Okay, brilliant.

Okay.

And then, of course, evolution will give us man at the end here. Of course.

One step beyond these robots, and the image will move forward. Okay, well, I

think I'd quite like to get a volunteer, so how about a volunteer? How about

you, the grey jumper?

Yeah?

Okay, Jocelyn.

What I want you to do is try picking up part of the body, okay, a pixel bot, and

pretending it's a naughty pixel bot.

Put it over there. Just move it out of the way.

Okay, let's take a leg.

See what happens.

So you can see they're actually all compensating for it. So now the leg has

become the hand.

Let's try and check it, Jocelyn. Let's take two or three. So move a couple of

the legs.

And a body. Get a green one as well.

Yeah, get a foot as well.

Right, and then plunk them down. Let's see how they get on.

Wow, this is amazing, Paul. So you can see that they want to move,

and then not only that, they can actually change colour. So the foot has

become either a hand or an arm.

and the rest of the body has compensated for it. That's right. That's amazing. I

don't think we can outsmart her just then, can we?

Unfortunately not. But that's brilliant. Thank you very much, Jocelyn.

The

pixel

bots are a little bit too small for our keyboard players.

So the University of Plymouth have donated part of their robot football

the cause.

And here they are.

And these little fellas have just come back from playing football in China.

And these six robots are able to share information between themselves.

So when they get an instruction to play a note, say a key on a keyboard, the

message is passed to all six robots.

And the closest robot to that key will play it.

Now, eagle -eyed Doctor Who fans will have noticed that they've all come

as different incarnations of the Doctor himself.

I think this one's my favourite, with a little scarf here.

But let's hear them in action.

That was pretty good.

That was slightly imperfect, but not bad for some Doctor Whos, I think.

Now, I think that's pretty good because our orchestra is almost complete.

Towards the start of the lecture, I mentioned robots will be all controlled

using MIDI information.

sent to each robot in real time that would tell them what to play.

Well, once we've gathered this many robots, we felt the time was right to

them all together and try it out.

So, what we should be able to hear is what we heard two days ago

at the first rehearsal of our robot orchestra.

And here is some footage we have.

We connected everything together and do we want to hear it?

Yeah. I warn you, it's not pretty.

Here it goes.

What do we think?

Now, I'm not sure about you, but it didn't quite sound like the Doctor Who

tune I've got in my head. And it's sort of in there somewhere, I think.

But it wasn't great. So what was going wrong?

And although we were telling the robots to play their notes at exactly the same

time, some robots were taking slightly longer to play their notes, while others

were doing it very quickly.

Now this gap is called latency, and it makes the orchestra sound out of time.

So we had to go around every robot and calculate how long to the nearest

millisecond it took each robot to play a note.

We then had to work out those figures into the score, meaning we'd cue some

robots to play a fraction of a second before the others, so that when we hear

the finished thing, They all sound like they're in time.

Now, last but definitely not least, when designing our robot orchestra, we

wanted to include a percussionist that would be unashamedly cool and take to

air.

Now, you may have seen quadcopters for sale in toy shops, but nothing quite

this. Let's just watch what it can do.

clever bit is, nobody's controlling it.

Instead, the flight of the quadcopter is being precisely controlled by a

computer, and the software design has been designed by a team at Bristol

Robotics Laboratory.

Now, if you look above your head, some of you, you'll see some of these glowing

red circles, and there's a few of them around the lecture theatre.

Now, in fact, these are small infrared cameras.

And they're looking for small balls just like this one, which have been placed

around the quadcopter.

These are motion capture reflectors. They're the same thing that filmmakers

would use to turn an actor into a CGI character.

But we're using them to tell the computer exactly where the drone is in

lecture theatre.

Now, on screen, you can see the position of the cameras and the position of the

drone.

Now, if the drone stays in this precise location in 3D space, those four motors

can speed up or slow down and move it back to where it's supposed to be.

But it's not just a quadcopter we can track.

We've attached some motion capture reflectors to this teapot.

And if I wave this around...

We should see the cameras are tracking the position of this teapot as well.

And we programmed this computer to recognize the movement of my teapot and

adjust the position of the quadcopter accordingly.

So I should be able to control this quadcopter with my teapot.

How good is that?

That's fantastic.

Now let's see how good I am at landing this.

Not so good.

In our robot orchestra, the quadcopter's tether has been connected to this arm

down here, which is positioned so that when the quadcopter jumps into the air,

it will strike and crash the symbol, like so.

So the flight path for each of these jumps has been pre -programmed and will

cued by a mini -signal, just like all of the other robots.

So it's completely automated.

Right. I think our orchestra is just about complete.

But we have a few more robot musicians I'd like you to meet.

So can we bring on the rest of the robot, please?

Now, as well as Mortimer, the drummer...

We've also brought in this robotic drum kit that's been designed by a team at

King's College London.

So can we hear a little bit from this robot, please?

Excellent. And at the back, next to the quadcopter, is a pipe organ that,

believe it or not, used to be made out of a set of shelves.

And it was hacked out of household items by a researcher at the University of

Aberystwyth. And the air is actually being pushed through the pipes by an old

vacuum cleaner.

So can I hear a tune out of the pipes, please?

Now that's how to hack your home. Very cool indeed.

We've also got a robotic glockenspiel.

And this very cool electric guitar, which uses compressed air to push

down the levers on the strings.

Can we hear the guitar?

Excellent. Okay.

Now, as promised...

we've invited some human musicians to join our robot too. So please can you

welcome Galia, Robert, Chris and Kate from the London...

Now,

I

think we're actually there. So I'll just let you guys get comfortable there.

And please welcome Andy Lambert from City University London, who has been

conducting this robot orchestra in the past few days. A huge round of applause

for Andy.

I've not actually heard these robots play together yet.

So I genuinely have no idea how this is going to sound. So I'm with you guys

tonight. And even if the humans outshine the robots, we'll have shown that

performing in an orchestra is not beyond the grasp of machines.

If we can master the technologies we've seen over the past hour, we should be

able to make a better future for everyone, be that 3D printing limbs or

discovering other planets.

I call this lecture a new revolution.

And the hacking revolution starts right here.

I want you to stop thinking about your phone or your laptop as a black box, but

something you can tinker with.

If your phone doesn't do what you want it to do, write an app of your own.

If something in your house doesn't behave the way you want it to, think

how you can hack it, how you can take control.

We set ourselves... Three grand challenges in these lectures.

And my final challenge is to you.

What is your great engineering challenge?

What problem are you going to solve?

And if you haven't worked it out yet, that's okay too.

Now is the time to get those skills, learn some code, buy that simple

electronics kit.

Then, when the inspiration hits, you'll be ready and sparks will fly.

Now, I'm going to leave you tonight with the first ever performance of the Royal

Institution Robot Orchestra.

Are we ready for this?

Yeah? Brilliant. Okay, take it away, Andy.