NOEL Sharkey is in the mood to debunk a few myths.
The 56-year-old professor of computer science at Sheffield University is at the forefront of robotic technology in this country and there's a few things he wants to get off his chest.
"Everybody wants to hear that robots are going to take over the world but it's not going to happen," he says.
"You get a lot of scientists, particularly American scientists, saying that robotics is about at the level of the rat at the moment, I would say it's not anywhere near even a simple bacteria."
With his gentle Irish lilt, long grey hair held back in a ponytail, this softly-spoken 56-year-old grandfather appears every bit the wacky scientist – he looks somewhere between The Fast Show's mad professor, Denzil Dexter, and a Grateful Dead fan.
But there is an incredibly sharp mind behind the slightly unkempt facade and he's a man in demand.
As well as being a senior fellow on the Engineering Physical Research Council, Prof Sharkey was the chief judge on the BBC's Robot Wars, and has recently been interviewed by Sky Movies for a documentary into the making of the animated sci-fi film Robots, starring the voices of Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry and Robin Williams.
Oh and he also happens to edit three robotics and neurocomputing journals – "I'm an efficient worker," he says modestly.
Prof Sharkey has just returned from the national robotics championships in Egypt where he supplied all the robots and taught the students how to programme them.
At the weekend he heads to China where, among other things, he will chair a debate into whether robots can ever gain consciousness.
"We've been saying that since the 50s but there's not much chance of it happening," he says.
Not that he's trying to rubbish the detailed field of robotics research – far from it – he simply feels compelled to inject a degree of realism into a topic which readily surrenders itself to the fantastical.
"We are getting on incredibly well mechanically and with computers, but artificial intelligence (AI) is still not forthcoming compared to what you see in the movies."
Put simply, Prof Sharkey's job is to "raise awareness of engineering and science" but he is worried by the apparent apathy in this country.
"The number of engineers is dropping dramatically, it seems dull and boring to people, whereas if you go to India or China everybody there wants to be an engineer and we need to do something about this," he says.
"In this country we are brilliant with sticky tape and that kind of thing but we don't have the manufacturers. Japan is so far ahead technologically it's impossible to catch up.
"They have running robots and somersaulting robots," he says.
Humanoid walking robots have only been developed in the last couple of years but it cost Honda millions of pounds to make the breakthrough with its asimo robot.
"I had a chance to play with that and it is extraordinary," the professor says. "When I saw it my immediate thought was there's a kid in there. It can do Michael Jackson's moonwalk, it can run and it can walk in slow motion.
"But these are the kind of things we're only developing now after 50 years of research. But it's still what I would call artificially stupid – it can do all these things but it has no capacity to think."
Prof Sharkey has come a long way since leaving school at the age of 15.
Brought up in a mixed Catholic-Protestant household in Coleraine he found school tedious and boring, preferring instead to ferret himself away at home where he devoured books on everything from geometry to history.
"I used to keep it a secret because people would have laughed at me. I used to come out of bookshops as if I was carrying pornography in a brown paper bag."
One of the few fond memories he has of his schooldays is beating his headmaster at chess as a 14-year-old.
"He wouldn't believe that I played chess, he thought I was stupid. But I humiliated him in front of the whole class and just as I was about to check mate him he said he had an appointment and walked out with the whole of the class on their tables cheering."
After leaving school he trained as a psychiatric nurse and came top of his year at Exeter University with a first in psychology.
He finished his PhD and was offered a research post at Yale University in America, working with artificial intelligence and cognitive science groups.
This led him towards the field of robotics research and in 1989 he built his first robot – a mathematical model of the nervous system.
"You can simulate things but you can't beat the physics of the real world and my first experiment involved moving a robot down a corridor. It avoided people and turned corners and from that point I was hooked."
He has since created all sorts of robots, including one that can fly, but admits the technological developments are slow.
"The difficult things are the ones you wouldn't think are difficult, like vision. You can programme something to take photographs but there's no one inside to understand them, it's a bit like a television."
The professor is halfway through a book, called The Tin Man, which is both a history of robotics and an investigation into man as machine.
"Robotics, or automatons," he says, "goes back to around 3000BC and has always been associated with a kind of trickery and magic. Some Egyptian temples had talking statues, they had people inside but it was the same kind of fascination."
The first time a robot was seen in a film was in Fritz Lang's masterpiece Metropolis, but Prof Sharkey argues in reality we haven't come close to re-creating that.
But he believes today's films can have a bearing on the future.
"The good thing about movies like Robots is that youngsters will look at what robots can do in it and that will be their creative aim.
"I continually meet children who come up with solutions to things that engineers couldn't come up with because they haven't learned constraints.
"I've seen two boys who built a unicycle which could drive on its own and it looked like magic and all the engineers with me said 'no, no, that's not possible, we can't be seeing this.'
"But the boys didn't think of the problems they came up with solutions."
Perhaps robots will actually take over the world one day because sometimes the impossible does actually happen.
chris.bond@ypn.co.uk
Sky Movies's exclusive Robots Special can be seen on Sky Movies 9, on Friday, March 11, at 4.15pm.
Robots (PG) is on general release at cinemas nationwide from Friday, March 18.