An anthropomorphic robot, capable of manoeuvring itself with ease in our environment and of interacting with it, and capable of understanding our commands and executing them. A tireless and trusty mechanical ‘slave,’ in fact. This age old dream of humanity, which has fed so many science fiction novels is perhaps no longer so distant. Professor Justus Piater, of the University of Liège, is developing learning protocols for the grasping of objects within the framework of the European programme, PACO-PLUS.

PACO-PLUS, for ‘Perception, Action and Cognition through learning of object-action complexes,’ is an integrated research project, launched by the European Commission in 2006, which brings together around a dozen research teams from as many European countries. It aims at developing an anthropomorphic robot which shares people’s living spaces, is capable of developing its own concepts and operating in an autonomous manner. ‘A robot which is capable of, for example, clearing the table and filling the dishwasher,’ states Professor Justus Piater, of the ‘Intelsig’ group (Signal and Image Exploitation) at the Department of Electricity, Electronics and Computer Science in the University of Liège’s Faculty of Applied Sciences.