A Westcountry university is at the forefront of a multi-million-pound research project to design a new breed of robot that can form memories and engage in social interaction.

Plymouth University is part of a Europe-wide consortium taking part in the £6.96 million project, codenamed ALIZ-E.

The European Commission-funded work is hoping to overcome traditional limitations in artificial intelligence by building social cognition for the robots.

To achieve this the robots will be connected to internet-based programmes with much greater computing power.

Plymouth University will be leading the team of eight European institutions and a Milan-based hospital hoping to use the robot for the rehabilitation of young patients.

Dr Tony Belpaeme, the project leader, said: "The aim of the ALIZ-E project is to explore how human-robot interactions can be extended from minutes to the scale of days, thus forging longer-term constructive bonds between robot and user.

"The ALIZ-E project will use the principles of embodied cognitive robotics to create agents capable of sustaining believable, in-depth social relationships with young users, over an extended, potentially discontinuous timeframe."

Dr Belpaeme said one of the current limitations of robots was the size of their on-board processors, which are incapable of forming "memories" over a long period of time.

He said that by using experts across Europe, the team will hope to create a system which will enable the robots to store and recall information and modify their behaviour on the basis of previous experiences.

The partners have all been selected for specific roles, including speech recognition at the National Research Council in Italy, recognition of emotion at the University of Hertfordshire, and development of the "cloud" computing techniques that will be at the heart of this memory system, in France. There are currently 20 of the robots being worked on across the partnership.

Each weighs 4.3 kilos and stands 58 centimetres tall.

The project has been funded under the European Commission seventh Framework Programme.

Dr Belpaeme said: "The ALIZ-E programme will look to develop a viable alternative to animal assisted therapy (AAT) – a practice whereby children in hospital are given animal companions during serious, long-term illnesses.

"We will specifically explore robot-child interaction capitalising on children's open and imaginative responses to artificial 'creatures'.

"When a child is in hospital and has to learn how to manage a long-term condition such as diabetes, it becomes very important to develop effective communication.

"The theory is that the robot acts as a companion and a communication channel between patient, parents and hospital staff.

"We will essentially be taking robots out of the lab and putting them to the test in a health education role, with young diabetic patients, in a busy paediatric department at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan."