“At the moment, the devices we are developing still have an operator in the loop,” says Jon Wakeling. “But if you were to talk to me in five-to-ten years’ time, we’d be discussing device automation and autonomy.” Wakeling, who is acting director at Openreach Research (part of British Telecom’s Applied Research division), is discussing robots currently under development in BT’s latest research facility at Adastral Park, where he leads “a small team performing technology and capability discovery, working with universities to take concepts through to early-stage prototypes”.
In a utopian future, according to Wakeling, we will have robots at our disposal that dig under roads and across gardens to deploy cables, freeing up human engineering capacity. That is the long-term objective, he says, “but there are a host of challenges” that could obstruct this pathway. While many such obstacles can be circumvented through technology development, there remain others...