It was deja vu for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) film crew on Jan. 31 when they returned to CMU to shoot scenes for "Robocritters," an upcoming TV documentary about robots.

Nine days earlier the crew completed their first sucessful shoot here, working an 11-hour day with few breaks. It was not until they left Pittsburgh to shoot another segment in Boston that they learned disaster had struck.

In a phone call to Boston from a transport company, producer Derek Hall learned that tapes containing a week's worth of filming in the U.S. had been lost. Hall said this was the most dreadful blow he had ever received in his 20-year career.

"It is very rare for film to be lost," he says. The loss meant that scenes had to be reshot from the West Coast to the East Coast. If anyone on the film crew was unavailable for the extra work, Hall knew his plans would collapse.

Luckily everyone cooperated and the film crew got a brief two day rest in Boston before returning to Pittsburgh to begin their reshooting schedule, working backwards to their original starting point in California.

Soundman Steve Shearn says they were already jet-lagged after flying from London. "The time change really messes with your mind" Shearn says. "We flew from London to Denver with a seven-hour difference and then filmed in San Francisco before heading back east to Pittsburgh and Boston."

In spite of it all, the crew show positive attitudes when they arrive for the second time in Wean 5315, the lab of Sebastian Thrun. Accompanying Shearn and Hall are cameraman Clive North, assistant Ash Mills and CMU staff member Ken Sharp, who served as their guide for the day.

The crew wastes no time setting up the shoot. After all, they have a full rehearsal under their belts. They unload lights, backdrops, sound recorders, monitors, and cameras from 26 cases weighing nearly 700 pounds and valued at $150,000.

The equipment "goes where we go," Mills says. "We each stay in separate hotel rooms when we travel so that we will have room to store all our equipment."

Mills unpacks the lighting for the first shoot, lifting them out of boxes protected with thick cushioning. "Parts of the lights are quite fragile so they have to be reassembled at each shoot" he says. He dons a glove to handle the bulbs, explaining that oil residue from his hands can "fry" them. "They are the most delicate equipment we carry and just one broken light bulb can ruin a shoot."

The first scene is about Nursebot Flo, the star attraction in Thrun's lab. Flo is a robot developed to be a companion for the elderly. She can serve as a reminding service, an information link to the outside world and a "telepresence" connecting a person to visitors. She can even remind you when your friends and relatives are having birthdays.

Graduate student Nick Roy carries on a conversation with Flo. With deep, clear resonance, he asks, "Flo, what time is it?" Flo responds "It's 10 o'clock in the mornin'" in a definite Irish brogue. Flo normally doesn't have an accent, but her speech synthesizer takes English text and uses a fixed set of rules to translate.

"For the most part it works pretty well, but certain words are exceptions and come out sounding a little different," says graduate student Mike Montemerlo, who works closely with Roy.

Montemerlo is the star of the next scene as he sits in front of his computer and expertly explains the mapping and localization involved in making Flo mobile. Flo uses a laser range finder to help her move around. Her sensors follow a two-dimensional map. allowing Montemerlo to track her progress on a computer screen that displays the mental map that Flo has built. He explains how this works as cameraman North zooms in for a tight shot of the screen. You can watch Flo as she meets an obstruction in her path, stops and navigates around it.

Flo's job for the final scene involves traversing the corridor outside the lab. When she reacts sluggishly, Montemerlo has to re-enter the program that controls her movement. Flo finally exits the lab with a slightly bobbing motion, which inventor Thrun attributes to a flaw in her design. The animated motion is quite appealing, however. It makes her seem a little less, well, robotic.

In the afternoon, the crew moves to Newell Simon Hall 3215. This is the lab of Hans Moravec, director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory and the first to build a mobile robot. Moravec is known for his books Mind Children and Robot, describing a world in which robots evolve to surpass mankind. "There will be nothing humans can do that robots cannot do better," Moravec says.

Moravec is good humored about the returning crew. Hall laments that it is a bit like the movie Groundhog Day, where the same 24-hour day is lived over and over again. Moravec sits down on a stool for a question-and-answer segment, munching on M&M's and joking that an elevated sugar level makes him sharper. Hall begins his sound check by asking questions to guide Moravec through the monologue. This is done to prevent scientific jargon from becoming too technical and to make sure the delivery is easy to understand and entertaining.

Soundman Shearn keeps a separate tape recording of this dialogue Hall's questions are later edited out. This enables them to use segments from different takes to piece together the perfect scene. "Can you start by telling us where we are with robots today?" Hall asks. "Retracing a path of evolution, robots today are at the stage of the first vertebrates," Moravec answers. He then goes on to outline his theory that robots will one day evolve to surpass the complexities and abilities of humans.

"How intelligent will these machines have to be?" asks Hall. "The first generation robot will be machine-like," Moravec says. "It will obey an application program written for it. The second-generation robot will be able to learn by conditioning programs. This means they will be able to tell the difference between right and wrong, based on defined conditioning signals they will have installed. "Third-generation robots will have a world simulator," Moravec continues. "They will be able to learn by mental rehearsals. It will be possible for them to simulate the world and rehearse actions. The robot will observe his own actions based on internal simulator ... This will teach it which actions are acceptable and which are not. It would learn not to do things like starting a fire with money or using a child to hold up furniture."

Moravec predicts that fourth-generation robots will be capable of general purpose reasoning. "They will be able to produce for the economy in a better and cheaper manner than man. We will have a fully automated economy with no human involvement, which will be run by robotic corporations. Humans will enjoy the fruits of their labor and the last job of man will be to establish laws and legalities for these robots to abide by. "We will simply be developing a high-tech hunter/gatherer society," Moravec concludes. "Man used to harvest food and live off materials provided by nature, which is a process that runs itself." Life, he explains, will be less labor-intensive, and will be geared more toward enjoyment and intellectual pursuits.

On that note, Hall wraps up the shot and proceeds for his last setup for the day. The crew quickly moves to Moravec's office to film his station with three computers. Moravec moves easily among the screens and a zoom shot is taken of the of an antimated robotic vacuum cleaner.

Soon the last shoot is over and another 14-hour day is behind the crew. They now have to load the equipment into their rented van and head back to their hotel room with their precious cargo. This time they will not let the footage tapes leave their sight until they land back in Great Britain to hand-deliver the containers.

Kathy Brown Sutton