iRat Lingodroids visit Year 2s at Sherwood
iRats are robots with ideas that they can communicate. They can make a date with each other to meet in a particular place - once they know where they both know where that particular place is.
A team at the University of Queensland's Information Technology and Engineering Department are developing these Lingodroids.
National Science Week brought one of the researchers, Dr Dan Angus, to the Ekka to talk with Speculative Fiction writer, Charlotte Nash, about how science fiction inspires science.
Dr Dan, as he was dubbed by the event compere UQ science & communication student Carl Smith, explained how most of his work with computers and robots is inspired by nature so really nature inspires science fiction as well as science.
Bees and ants have secrets that he - and other researchers - try to learn to solve difficult organizational and navigation problems. For instance, have you ever stopped to think how something you buy on the internet overseas arrives on your doorstep?
Dr Dan explains how the way bees pack their honey in a hive helps solve the dilemma of packing shipping containers - check out the video on our Does Sci-Fi Inspire Science Channel.
When you shop on the internet, your item may end up in a shipping container and that shipping container may be one of thousands loaded onto a ship. So what happens it the ship stops in Brisbane and your container is at the bottom of the pile and the ship's next port is Sydney? They would have to unload all the containers to get the Brisbane crate off and then load all the Sydney crates back up?
"Because bees are good at organizing things like their honey we look for those kinds of solutions they make to inspire solutions here," Dr Dan said.
But when it comes to programming a computer to schedule trains, like in Japan, scientists look to ants, he says.
"Ants can actually find a shortcut through networks really, really well and we use this to inspire systems that can solve these kinds of transport problems," he said.
Dr Dan also explains the process of making idea maps in order to teach a robot how to communicate. Robots with ideas actually think for themselves but, he warns, it's a long way to go yet before they take over the world like in science fiction movies such as The Matrix or Terminator.
