Their inventor and developer was William Grey Walter who just before the outbreak of the second world war opened the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol, England.
His ‘tortoises’, complete with primitive neural pathways, led to new insights into the function of the nervous system, and to Grey Walter becoming recognised as a founding father of cybernetics.
A principal motivation behind his work was his belief that the secret of how the brain worked lay in how it was wired up.
He wanted to prove that connections between a small number of brain cells could give rise to very complex behaviours.
His first robots, Elmer and Elsie ( full name Electro Mechanical Robot, Light Sensitive with Internal and External Sensitivity) constructed between 1948 and 1949, were mobile with a plastic shell that was phototropic – it could follow light – and acted as a bump sensor.
The robots were designed to show the interaction between two sensory systems: light-sensitive and touch-sensitive control mechanisms (in effect, two nerve cells with visual and tactile inputs). These systems interacted with the motor drive in such a way that the tortoises exhibited ‘behaviour’; finding their way around obstacles.
A contemporary review reported the following;
The machines are fitted with a small flash-lamp bulb in the head which is turned off automatically whenever the photo-cell receives an adequate light signal. When a mirror or white surface is encountered the reflected light from the head-lamp is sufficient to operate the circuit controlling the robot's response to light, so that the machine makes for its own reflection; but as it does so, the light is extinguished, which means that the stimulus is cut off — but removal of the stimulus restores the light, which is again seen as a stimulus, and so on. The creature therefore lingers before a mirror, flickering, twittering, and jigging like a clumsy Narcissus. The behaviour of a creature thus engaged with its own reflection is quite specific, and on a purely empirical basis, if it were observed in an animal, might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness. In this way the machine is superior to many quite 'high' animals who usually treat their reflection as if it were another animal, if they accept it at all.
In 1951 three new "tortoises" were displayed at the Festival of Britain and caused great interest, but after the Festival they were auctioned off. Their whereabouts is not known.
It is believed that the pioneering robots, Elmer and Elsie were scrapped.
In 1970 Grey Walter suffered severe brain damage in a road accident which effectively ended his career. Only one tortoise remained which passed to Grey Walter’s son Nicholas, following his death in 1977.
Nicholas stored the tortoise in his basement in Islington, North London until 1995 where it was finally located.
A team of scientists carefully restored the tortoise to working order, but it was fragile and could not really be used for any extended experiments.
The solution was to build replicas.
The project commenced in 1995 and was greatly assisted by Bunny Warren, the designer of the 1951 batch, who still worked at the Burden Institute.
He was able to produce many original records and spare parts, including some of the transparent perspex (Plexiglas) shells that he had been using as cloches in his garden.
In a satisfactory repeat of history, the two replicas, Ninja and Amy, were demonstrated at the Millennium Dome, almost 50 years after the Festival of Britain.
The surviving original; a replica is in the Science Museum.
They were described as "tortoises" due to their shape and slow rate of movement – and because they effectively ‘taught us’ about the secrets of organisation and life.
Things have certainly come a very long way since these early experiments in robots.
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