In an experiment, researchers tried to show that there could be self-awareness in robots. The experiment was led by Selmer Bringsjord, who is a professor of computer science and cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He used three programmable NAO Robots.

An open challenge given by Luciano Floridi, a renowned professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, was also a reason behind carrying out the experiment.

According to Dr. Bringsjord, “Floridi's challenge, which we refer to as 'KG4,' requires that a robot have a form of genuine self-understanding ... a human-level justification/proof to accompany the behavior, in which the robot employ a correlated to the personal pronoun 'I’”. He added that the inputs come in natural language, immediately.

On the whole, the robot has to understand that it has an identity and it needs to recognize that, and know how to react.

In the experiment, all three robots were having the ability to speak, however two were kept silent through programming. As per reports, the researchers told them that two of them had got a "dumbing pill" causing them to become silent, and then asked all of them to find out which of them was able to speak. One robot replied it did not know, however after hearing its own voice, it changed its statement and said that it was given a dumbing pill.

It could be a great achievement for humans to be able to examine situations and teach new behavior. However, it is also not easy for a robot to understand new situations.