Robot technology is becoming more a d more sophisticated, and although they may not be about to take over the world, are they about to make important contributions to the arts world? Simon Tait meets the man behind RoboThespians, Will Jackson.

How closely related are theatre and the latest generation of robots? Is the connection the art, the mechanics, the humour? Is the difference computer technology? Actually, the relationship is pretty damn close.

Next year could see their coming of age when they take part in a play at a new science centre opening in Warsaw next year.

The moving, talking, singing, acting, sort-of-dancing RoboThespian, or RT, whose eyelids even close over his moving eyeballs as he speaks, has been developed in Cornwall by Engineered Arts whose director is Will Jackson.

He had studied 3D design before finding himself in the film industry making advertising movies – RT’s earliest ancestor, believe it or not, is the furry pink rabbit of the Duracel ad. He went to New York where his textile designer partner Tracy had work, but he found Madison Avenue well paid but, well, dull, and they moved on to Australia for a couple of years, working on animation.

He began building his own machines, specifically unique slot machines, working with the automaton designer Tim Hunkin, and some of Will’s creations are still part of Tim’s Under the Pier collection at Southwold in Sufolk.

Together they worked on the Science Museum’s The Secret Life of the Home – Will has a knack of getting to what children really need to know, and developed the cut-in-half-toilet to show exactly where the poo goes.

Then came Cornwall’s Eden Project, the “biomes” which constitute more than a green theme park for which he and Paul Spooner, another artist working with automaton machines who uses his carving genius to make his pieces, created figures that would show what the world would be without plants.