As part of the project by Plymouth University researchers, two robots will be built featuring software that allows them to interact with each other to exchange learned information like humans. ... 'It is not really easy to copy and paste information from one robot brain to another because if you do that you are going to upset everything that the robot already knows. What we can do is let robots talk to each other over an internet connection, interact and exchange information in the way that children would exchange information in a nursery,' said Belpaeme.

The aim is for the robots to learn concepts including the meaning of words, names of objects, simple verbs and relations between objects, such as on, in, near or far.

Their ability to understand these will then be tested through simple games.

If the software that the researchers develop works successfully on the initial robots, they plan to build it into the iCub, a robot resembling a five-year-old child, which they built as part of a previous project called the iTalk."