Suzanne Palmer, Daw Books

Sylvia Park, Magpie

Robots and whether they will one day deserve to be treated like people – or destroy humanity, or both – have interested writers for well over a century now.

In the real world, the robot threat appears to involve the uses of artificial intelligence in misinformation and more direct forms of warfare such as drone attacks. In the world of literature, however, many writers focus on individual robots. Maybe giving the AI a body and a face simply helps tell your story better to creatures with bodies and faces.

Fictional robots have a lot going for them. They can be funny, cool or sexy. They can be nerdy and a bit depressed. Some represent “the other”, a test of how humane we are. They can also help us think about concepts of ownership that may apply to our treatment of pets or farm animals. And they can be terrifying killing machines. Murderbot, created by Martha Wells, is a good example of a robot that ticks all those boxes.

This month, I have read two very different robot books. Both are thoughtful and well written, with richly realised internal worlds, but there the similarities end.

In Ode to the Half-Broken by Suzanne Palmer, an old robot comes out of a long period of self-isolation after enemies unknown steal one of its legs. A half-dog, half-robot creature offers to help find its leg, and they are joined by a human mechanic and an emancipated aerial drone. The author calls them a “motley crew”, and that is what they are.

In Luminous, the robots are all abused and your heart goes out to them, but they are, in some cases, dangerous

Our gang’s quest becomes about more than the missing leg. Weird stuff is going on, and the old robot worries that dangerous forces may threaten the world’s steps towards recovery after an apocalypse.

In Palmer’s future, the robots have worked out how to free themselves and are treated with respect, by and large. Our hero, the old robot, is a superhero, with state-of-the-art armour ready to activate. Pre-emancipation, its past was dark, but the tone of the book is cheerful, and could be enjoyed by younger readers. There is an intelligent, talking train, after all. It even says, on my early proof copy: “The dog lives.” There is an assured, comic tone that reminds me of Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky and Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle .

Silvia Park’s debut Luminous is not at all comic. Apparently, it began life as a story aimed at kids, but you probably wouldn’t give it to a child to read. In Park’s future, 20 years after the reunification of Korea, robots are ubiquitous, easy to mistake for humans and bought to replace dead children, or work as domestic or sex workers. They are “only” human imitations and are often treated very badly.

One of the human heroes, Jun, has a deadbeat police job in Robot Crimes. The crimes largely involve the theft of robots; how you treat your robot is mostly up to you. Jun’s sister Morgan works in robotics and is living with one of her creations, a butler-boyfriend called Stephen.

She is trying to create humanity in the robot by isolating him from outside influences, but switches him off when she doesn’t like his behaviour. Both Jun and Morgan have never recovered from the loss of a robot who was like a brother to them. Meanwhile, across the city, a young girl has discovered a strange creature in a scrapyard

There are flashes of brilliance in Park’s depiction of the robots. They are all abused and your heart goes out to them, but they are complicated and, in some cases, dangerous. Stephen is a particularly interesting character; I could have probably read a whole book about him. I look forward to whatever Park writes next.

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Emily also recommends…

TV

(2003-2009) Ronald D. Moore, Prime Video

The human-looking Cylons in the TV reboot of Battlestar Galactica are the most enjoyable robots ever created. Think of how much happens to them, and what they are capable of. You also don’t know which human characters are Cylons until nearly the end of the show. Start with the 2003 miniseries before plunging into the four-series arc.

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Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series (Inanna, Gilgamesh and Ninshubar, all published by Titan) and she is currently working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ and you can follow her on Instagram @emilyhwilson1

A small robot submarine is setting out to go around the world for the first time. Teledyne Marine and Rutgers University New Brunswick in New Jersey are launching an underwater glider called Redwing on its Sentinel Mission from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts on 11 October.

Researchers have been using underwater gliders since the 1990s. Rather than a propeller, gliders have a buoyancy engine, a gas-filled piston that slightly changes the craft’s overall buoyancy. An electric motor pushes the piston in to make the glider heavier than water so it slowly sinks, coasting downwards at a shallow angle. On reaching the bottom of the dive at around 1000 metres, the piston is pulled out and the submarine, now buoyant, glides upwards. The result is slow and steady progress along a sawtooth trajectory. Auxiliary propellers can be engaged where needed, but the aim is to avoid this.

“Redwing will be gliding with the currents rather than fighting them, travelling at an average speed of 0.75 knots”, or just under 1 mile per hour, says at Teledyne Marine, who is leading the Sentinel Mission.

At 2.57 metres long, Redwing is no bigger than a surfboard, but weighs 171 kilograms. Previous gliders carried out missions lasting months – Redwing’s fuselage is packed with batteries, giving it even greater endurance.

“The historic Sentinel Mission aims to achieve its circumnavigation in around five years,” at Teledyne Marine. Redwing will travel alone, tracked by engineers from Teledyne Webb Research and students from Rutgers University, as it surfaces and communicates via satellite. Mission control will adjust the glider’s heading twice a day to keep it on the projected flightpath. During the five-year-long journey, it will probably need a battery change halfway through, says Maguire.

Redwing will follow the path of explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519-1522 circumnavigation, calling at Gran Canaria off north-western Africa, Cape Town in South Africa, Western Australia, New Zealand, the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic and possibly Brazil, before returning to Cape Cod, a journey of around 73,000 kilometres.

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Gliders can carry out long-range, long-endurance research missions without expensive support ships, and they have become vital for tracking data key to understanding climate change. Redwing will gather data on ocean currents and sea temperature in relatively unknown regions with a variety of instruments.

“We believe this is the most sustained open ocean sampling exercise ever undertaken,” says Maguire.

Previous glider missions crossed the Atlantic in 2009 and the Pacific in 2011, and have travelled under the Ross ice shelf and other inaccessible spots. “Gliders are brilliant tools to make measurements in areas that are too risky to send a ship – like the middle of a storm or hurricane, or in front of a calving glacier,” says at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The main hazards to completing the mission are likely to be fishing nets and shipping lanes rather than weather conditions. “Gliders are actually remarkably resilient, and are able to withstand strong winds and rough seas,” she says.

at the National Oceanography Centre in the UK says the glider will have to contend with other hazards too, including sharks and biofouling, in which plants and algae accumulate on the vessel’s outer shell. “Biofouling can make a glider inoperable due to marine growth on the glider’s exterior. In certain areas of the ocean, gliders have been lost due to sharks. Shipping and fishing occasionally damage or result in loss of gliders.”

Data from the mission will be shared with universities, schools and other institutions worldwide, but the main aim is to highlight the capabilities of gliders and inspire future missions.

An AI-powered robot was able to separate the gall bladder from the liver of a dead pig in what researchers claim is the first realistic surgery by a machine with almost no human intervention.

The robot is powered by a two-tier AI system trained on 17 hours of video encompassing 16,000 motions made in operations by human surgeons. When put to work, the first layer of the AI system watches video from an endoscope monitoring the surgery and issues plain-language instructions, such as “clip the second duct”, while the second AI layer turns each instruction into three-dimensional tool motions.

In all, the gall bladder surgery required 17 separate tasks. The robotic system performed the operation eight times, achieving 100 per cent success in all of the tasks.

“Current surgical robotic technology has made some procedures less invasive, but complication rates haven’t really dropped from previous laparoscopic [keyhole] surgeries [by human surgeons],” says team member at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “This made us look into what is the next generation of robotic systems that can help patients and surgeons.”

“The study really highlights the art of the possible with AI and surgical robotics,” says at University College London. “Incredible advances in computer vision for surgical video with the availability of open robotic platforms for research make it possible to demonstrate surgical automation.”

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But many challenges remain to make the system practical in clinical use, points out Stoyanov.

For one thing, while the robot completed the task with 100 per cent success, it had to self-correct six times per case. For example, this could mean a gripper designed to grasp an artery missed its hold on the first try.

“There were a lot of instances where it had to self-correct, but this was all fully autonomous,” says Krieger. “It would correctly identify the initial mistake and then fix itself.” The robot also had to ask a human to change one of its surgical instruments for another, meaning some level of human intervention was required.

at Imperial College London is enthused about the growing potential of robotic surgery. “The future is bright – and tantalisingly close,” he says. “Though to realise this safely in humans, regulation will need to follow suit, which remains a significant open challenge in our sector.”

The next step, says Krieger, is to let a robot operate autonomously on a live animal, where breathing and bleeding could complicate things.