Since the emergence of automation people have feared that machines would take their jobs. But, should our pets be worried too?
Press play above to see how Futureville Ireland presenter, Carla O'Brien, got on when she brought a hi-tech hound named Megabyte to meet some of the young players at Athlone GAA.
With Megabyte there are no vet bills, there's no poop scooping on walks and, as one of the kids pointed out, it won't go to the toilet in the house! Hands shot up when the young players were asked if anyone would like one for Christmas.
Plus, we meet team coach Darren Magee, who tries out a robot waiter named TIAGo at his coffee shop in the town. As a small business owner, the former Dublin footballer thinks we should embrace these new technologies.
While all all of this is great fun, it's backed up by serious science. Megabyte is a Unitree Go2 robot packed with LiDAR sensors and AI technology. It allows it to learn how to play and follow its owner.
TIAGo is a mobile manipulator robot made by PAL. One of it's uses is to help research how human and robots will interact. It is equipped with laser sensors and has machine learning capabilities. Ultimately, TIAGo will help us create personal assistant robots for the home. The robots were on a day trip to Athlone from Maynooth University's Robotics' department.
Futureville Ireland is streaming now on RTÉ Player.
What is a cobot?
To tell us more about where we are going and how robots will co-exist with humans in the future we hear from Gerry Lacey, Professor of Engineering at Maynooth University.
He explains: "A cobot is a robot that works alongside human beings so if you have something heavy to lift, a cobot will come in beside you and lift it with you. We're starting to see robots entering the real world, we're seeing robots acting as pets, as companions for the elderly, so right now we have robots acting to help doctors do surgery. Those operations would be impossible without robots.
"The dog, which we call Megabyte, is the research topic of my PhD student James Florin Petri. He is looking at how robots can learn to use very energy efficient ways of walking. We also use research on the dogs to understanding how we switch between our instincts for maintaining balance with higher level commands such as walking, running, and jumping.
"TIAGo is used to investigate the role of robots in the home. Most of our research in this area is led by my colleague Dr Rudi Villing. This 'human/robot interaction' looks at how robots can understand how to work in the home environment and interact with us using natural language. The long-term aim is to build personal assistants.
"In terms of the future of robots I think that we will see more robots in our homes, farms and shops - not just in factories. The future will be more about humans and robots co-operating to achieve tasks. Robots are good at repeating the boring or dangerous tasks - while people will focus on planning and adapting to changing conditions. Automation historically has made jobs more productive and increased the number of people needed because new types of higher skilled jobs appear such as a robotics engineer, digital twin designers and embodied AI programmers."
Futureville Ireland is the centre piece of RTÉ and Taighde Éireann's (Research Ireland) broadcast collaboration for Science Week.
For more Science Week on RTÉ visit www.rte.ie/scienceweek and go to www.scienceweek.ie for all the events taking place.
