The result of this was ‘Bob’ the robot, which received much media attention as ‘Bob’ was shown working as a security guard, patrolling the offices of a security company. ‘Bob’ was designed as part of a research group called STRANDS, and is made up of seven universities across Europe. ‘The STRANDS project has focused on what we can do to make a robot function for more than an hour or two – for days, weeks and months,’ says Dr Hawes. There are two interesting things about this, he says.