And I don’t just mean a particularly bogan strain of Orrstrayan, either. Researchers at two Queensland universities are creating a robot lexicon for a new language spoken purely by the shiny metal-bummed ‘bots, which have been dubbed the Lingodroids. Makes sense.
The Lingodroids are all outfitted with cameras, laser range finders and sonar-mapping, but also microphones and speakers for communicating with one another. If you’re wondering what on earth the robots could communicate about, so far it seems to be creating words to describe their locations. Random syllables and strung together and spoken to the other Lingodroid, until it’s decided that that’s the word for the room they’re in. Kind of like Tamagotchi, they play games with one another, strengthening their dictionary of words.
While it might just be child’s play – sorry, robot’s play – right now, the researchers working on the project at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology are confident they could one day get the robots talking to us humans. [Ieee Spectrum]