Steve Rogerson met some robots at last week’s Computex in Taipei.

Though I have travelled widely for work, including to Taiwan many times, and attended an uncountable number of trade shows, until this month I had never visited Computex in Taipei. But I am not alone.

On the night before the event, the organisers held what they called a media mixer, attended by more than 100 journalists, myself included. They had a quiz, with the questions mixed in with a survey of who was there, and one of the questions was about how many of the previous shows the collected media representatives had attended. I was pleased to discover that over a fifth of the journalists in the room were Computex virgins like me. A quick glance round though suggested I was probably the oldest Computex virgin.

While at the actual show, as I watched a robot dog go through its paces without licking me or making a mess on the carpet, I couldn’t help wonder just how far we have come now with robotics. This rather jerky four-legged friend already looked old fashioned with far more real-looking robots on show as AI and mechanical engineering merge in what is becoming known as physical AI. Physical AI can refer to industrial machinery in factories and in the energy market, but for many it is about robots.

At Computex, I saw queues for a robot coffee maker at the show entrance, a robot making shoes, even a robot pretending to be a duck. But the general view was this was just the beginning.

“Now we have more tools from companies such as Nvidia, robots are moving more to being like humans,” said Martin Chang, executive vice president at Taiwanese company J-Mex. “We are not there yet, but next year the robots will be a lot more like humans.”

J-Mex (www.jmex.com.tw) produces software for helping train robots. Humans perform the task while connected to the robots, which then learn how to do it themselves.

“Once what took months, now takes a little time,” Martin said. “Humans are intelligent, but there are lots of jobs where humans are limited because of their physical condition. Robots can be trained to be very efficient.”

Wayne Chang, account manager at IEI (www.ieiworld.com), was demonstrating robots designed for industrial applications. The robot on show from Castec (www.castec.com.tw) was powered by an IEI industrial computer.

“Industries are looking for something more sophisticated,” he said. “They are looking for robots that can learn by themselves rather than being programmed. AI is evolving very fast, so we don’t know where we are going.”

He said devices from Nvidia and Intel had changed the landscape, allowing industrial computers to be produced that were less expensive than traditional PLCs and had more intelligence.

“PLCs have been around for decades,” he said. “But since Industry 4.0 and AI, a lot of the processes have become more sophisticated. They want things that can think for themselves and detect stuff by themselves. To do that with PLCs would be much too expensive.”

He said modern robots could already detect if human workers were wearing the correct safety gear, for example, and sound alarms if they weren’t. And pointing to the robot moving around his stand, he said: “If I step in front of it, it will stop. There is no need to go back to the cloud. Edge AI lets it make quicker decisions on the spot.”

Many at the show were impressed by two robots from Vinrobotics (vinrobotics.net) walking around and interacting with people. I wonder how much they would have trusted one of them if they had seen what I saw a few minutes earlier when it nearly fell over and took two people and a mini-crane to get it back vertical.

That said, being a Star Wars fan, I couldn’t help but notice similarities between how this robot moved and reacted with what I had seen from the famous C-3PO. Not there yet, but add some conversational AI and improve its movements a bit and those predicting that the robot future is now closer than ever may have a point.

Maybe I lost my Computex virginity at the start of something big.