What the rise of the robots means for BT

A “Festival of Robotics” conjured images of dancing androids and canape-serving cyborgs, or at least one of those Boston Dynamics monstrosities that resembles a fleshless Terminator but moves like a gymnast. Held on a wet day at BT’s Adastral Park R&D facility, it did feature one of Boston Dynamics’ mechanized dogs, which performed some lively robot dressage before it scampered off at pitbull speed, presumably on a kill mission. But there was not much festival atmosphere.

The weather didn’t help. “The rain has had a squashing impact on our ability to have a beer tent and open summer garden, but we will have dancing and other exciting things such as robot wars,” said a spokesperson at a mid-morning presentation. Perhaps the robots came out to dance and fight in the evening, long after reporters had departed. The day felt more like a science fair at a slightly dilapidated 1970s-style university campus.

That is not to say it was a disappointment. Opened by the late Queen in 1975, Adastral Park sprawls across 100 acres of land in Suffolk, formerly used by the Royal Air Force. It might look more like a throwback to Britain’s original winter of discontent than something out of today’s Silicon Valley, but it is an unusually big and impressive R&D facility for a company in the connectivity business to have. More than 150 BT partners and around 4,000 people work there, according to the official literature. The logo of China’s Huawei was seen floating above one building.

BT’s involvement would probably baffle an average customer. Robotics, in particular, seems a world away from the sale of phone and broadband services, fixed or mobile, and BT has no desire to produce the next robot dog. But it is trying to figure out its role in a hi-tech world of autonomous machines and 5G-powered drones, which figured prominently on festival day. In January, it hired Marc Overton from Sierra Wireless, a maker of equipment for the “Internet of Things,” to lead a new business unit called Division X. The aim is partly to commercialize some of the technologies on display at Adastral Park.

Do androids dream of fruit-picking?

It is easier said than done. One problem for any company in this area is scale. Put simply, many of the robots look too niche to have mass-market appeal. The strawberry-picking robots in one hangar could be a solution to farm labor shortages in the aftermath of Brexit and lockdown, but – technology challenges aside – they are unlikely to be a money spinner for BT.

Unpiloted drones stand a better chance. Using the 5G network, drones could be programmed to fly long distances without much supervision, delivering vaccines to hospitals or relaying footage of faulty infrastructure back to an engineer. A drone courier service for everyday things sounds less far-fetched than most visions of driverless vehicles.

But the obstacles are enormous. For one thing, the drone market is currently dominated by DJI Technology, a Chinese company recently added to a US blacklist because of its alleged ties to the Chinese military. At the Adastral Park festival, there was evident frustration about DJI’s tight control of the software used in its drones. To get around that problem and experiment, researchers have apparently been reverse-engineering the technology. None of this sounds ideal from a commercial perspective.

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