Gates is barking mad for robodog that may soon have Rover licked

Published on Saturday 12 January 2008 19:04

MOVE over Rover. The MicroMutt looks set to be man's best friend in the 21st century.

Everyone sneered at a gawky youth named Bill Gates when he spent much of the early 1970s claiming that every home and workplace would one day have a personal computer.

Now the founder of Microsoft, whose visionary grasp of technological trends has made him the richest man on the planet, is claiming the home of tomorrow will come complete with a 21st-century version of Dr Who's trusty companion K9.

Gates has given a 60,000 grant to a British scientist to create a robot dog and research people's attitudes towards it.

Dr Shaun Lawson is convinced that within a decade technology will advance to allow cyberdogs to become an everyday reality. He is to outline his views at a major conference on artificial intelligence at Aberdeen University this year.

"The kinds of jobs that robots are being lined up to do in the future are similar to the things that we already get domestic dogs to do," said the University of Lincoln academic.

"Nobody appeared to be looking at this, so I decided to put the idea to Microsoft. They were extremely positive and came back offering me a grant of around 60,000 to carry out a year-long study."

Lawson and Microsoft share a vision that in future robot dogs will be used for search-and-rescue and disability assistance as well as for companionship and entertainment.

Lawson said: "Bill Gates is very interested in robotics and believes that fairly soon everyone will have robots at home, including robotic companions.

"There are clear advantages in having a robotic dog for people who have allergies, and there are also the issues of space, mess, food and the sheer amount of time and money that looking after a real dog take up.

"There are a variety of animatronics toy dogs on the market, while the computer game Nintendogs, where the goal is to care for a virtual pet, has sold more than 10 million copies."

Lawson, who once worked at Napier University in Edinburgh, added:

"A Microsoft representative told me that if they could distil what a disability assistance dog does for a person, then use that build a robot, they would be in business."