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Illustrated isometric view of an Olivaw-imagined Caldas da Rainha, with robots in a market, a thermal pool, a ceramics studio, and the streets of town.

Caldas da Rainha

How do we teach a robot to be a good neighbour?

The lab in Caldas da Rainha is where the mind is grown. A town of around fifty thousand people in the Oeste region of Portugal, ninety kilometres north of Lisbon, and the place the robots actually live, not a site they visit for trials. What happens to them here, day after day, is the research.

Why a town, and why this one

The size matters more than it first appears. A village would give a robot too little to grow against, the same few faces and situations coming round again and again. A large city would give too much and notice too little; the robots would disappear into it, and the place would never really register them or answer back. A town holds enough ordinary complexity to learn from: a daily market in continuous operation since the fifteenth century, a thermal hospital older than that, schools, a polytechnic, design ateliers, agriculture, regulars and strangers, while staying small enough to feel the robots arrive.

A town used to receiving what arrives

Caldas does not begin from a static identity. It grew up around a thermal hospital that Queen Leonor founded in 1485, around the people who came to use it, around the ceramics tradition that started later, around twentieth-century manufacturing, and around recent arrivals, since about a fifth of residents now come from outside Portugal, across a range of languages and origins. The town carries five centuries of practice receiving whoever shows up, and folding what they bring into ordinary life. That practice forms the cognitive corpus the lab works against.

The town carries five centuries of practice receiving whoever shows up.

What growing a mind here looks like

Four things the robots have to learn are things this town does every day.

Relationships build slowly, in small exchanges that do not look like much: returning faces, remembered names, the read of a crowd. The market is one of the oldest places people do this, and most of what passes between them there is neither transactional nor social, but both at once.

Welcoming the unfamiliar is a cognitive skill and not merely a courtesy. Caldas has been answering the question of what that takes since 1485.

Some kinds of knowing only pass between people working side by side. Ceramics is accumulated judgement about clay, weather, mood and the way a wheel turns, and the lab is interested in whether a mind can pick it up the way a person does, standing next to someone who already has it.

And trust builds in the everyday business of sharing space. Passing on a calçada, holding a door, being a regular. The streets are where the town decides who belongs, and the lab is working on what it takes for something new to earn a place.

Work for the people who live here

The lab brings between fifteen and twenty-five skilled jobs from year one, with the salaries spent locally. Research teams and visiting partners rent, eat, and live in Caldas. The work attracts robotics and AI groups that need a real-world deployment site, and over time a cluster grows: suppliers, spin-outs, services, and a credible path to robot manufacturing or assembly in the Oeste. Graduates of the Polytechnic of Leiria and ESAD.CR gain a local reason to stay rather than commute to Lisbon or leave Portugal. The Câmara can co-apply for the EU instruments built for exactly this kind of work, among them PRR Bairro Comercial Digital, the National AI Agenda and Horizon Europe, with the lab as a credible anchor.

A more capable town hall

The lab's founders bring particular expertise in modernising administrative systems with AI: routing, drafting, reconciling, and the routine work that grinds municipal services down when done by hand. The lab can pilot tools and processes for the Câmara itself alongside the research, so the administrative side of the town benefits directly from the work it hosts.

Care, and what it asks of a mind

Caldas has practised care since 1485. The thermal hospital still works; the Hospital do Oeste serves the region; the population ages across Portugal and across Europe; the questions about how a robot should behave around vulnerable bodies do not stay abstract here. The lab takes robots-in-care as one of its directions. What does a robot need to know to be near someone who feels unwell, or tired, or afraid, and how does it earn the trust a town extends to a healer? Caldas suits the work because the tradition still moves and the institutions still answer.

A creative city, still inventing things

Caldas joined the UNESCO Creative Cities network in 2019, in crafts and folk art. The lab fits that creative axis as much as the technical one. Robopsychology has not had a birthplace before; the field has been written about more than it has been done. Caldas could be where it gets done, in public, with the people who live here. ESAD.CR, the design school inside the polytechnic, works on health, on craft, on social design, and on the questions about what a humane technology looks like, all of which converge on the lab's research.

Robopsychology has not had a birthplace before.

A reason to stay

Technical and AI courses developed jointly with ESAD.CR and the Polytechnic of Leiria. Internships and apprenticeships for students at both institutions. Short upskilling programmes for residents who want to retrain. The pipeline runs in both directions: students gain a way into research that does not exist elsewhere in Portugal, and the lab gains local people who already know the town and want to stay.

Partnership, not backdrop

The town takes part as a partner rather than serving as a setting. The work proceeds with the municipality, with ESAD.CR, and with the Polytechnic of Leiria, and the lab builds the governance from the start: a citizen oversight board with real authority over where and when the robots operate, straightforward ways for residents to opt out, and clear safety arrangements, including the means to stop a robot at any time, that stay outside negotiation. The lab answers to the town because the town is the work.

These renders are visualisations of the lab, not photos

Praça da Fruta

The market has run in this square every morning since the fifteenth century, which makes it the richest test data the lab has. A Rocha pear at €1.20 a kilo, a stallholder deciding how much attention a customer is worth, a queue forming behind. Nobody briefs the robot first. What it gets wrong here goes into the next build.

The café

Two people arguing gently over coffee, and a third at the table that doesn't drink. Conversation runs on things nobody says: whose turn it is, when a pause means think and when it means go on, whether you are being included or tolerated. A robot that parses only the words gets about half of it, and the half it misses is the half people remember.

Rua das Montras

Walking beside someone turns out to be harder than walking. Match the pace, hold the line, leave the right gap, read the dog. The man coming the other way will decide in about a second whether to alter his course or expect the robot to alter its own, and he will not think about it at all. That second is the measurement.

ESAD ceramics

Ceramics carries knowledge nobody wrote down: how wet the clay is today, what the weather did to it, when to stop. The design school has passed it hand to hand for decades. The lab is asking whether a mind can pick it up the same way, standing next to someone who has it, because it is not a thing anyone can put in a dataset.

Bordallo Pinheiro

The moulds are heavy, the factory is old, and the woman correcting the robot has done this for years. Carrying weight without dropping it belongs to the layer below ours. Being told you are doing it wrong, and adjusting without being told twice, belongs to ours.

Parque D. Carlos I

An old man and a robot on a bench, watching ducks. The screen shows what the robot is looking at, which is the only part of it he can check. Nothing is being tested in the usual sense. Sitting with someone and not needing anything from them is a capability too, and an easy one to leave out.

The thermal hospital

Queen Leonor founded this hospital in 1485 and it still works. Care asks the hardest questions the lab has: how to stand near someone who feels unwell, how close is too close, what to do when a person says they are fine and everything else says otherwise. The woman with the shopping bag is the one whose answer counts.

The municipal library

A librarian pointing, a boy pointing, and a robot holding a book. Two people are teaching it where things live, the ordinary way anyone learns a building. The shelf is not the hard part. Still knowing the answer in six months, without having been asked to remember, is.

Centro de Artes

Dancers notice what a body is doing wrong faster than anyone, and say so more directly. Here they work on how the robot moves rather than whether it stays upright. People read intent off movement constantly without knowing they do it, so a robot that moves badly reads as strange long before it does anything strange.

Paragem n.º 7

Rain, a bus shelter, and a toddler who has decided to stare. None of this was scheduled. The mother is running the real evaluation, deciding second by second how much room to give the machine standing near her child. Making that decision easy for her is the whole specification.

Citizen oversight

Residents around a table of maps, deciding where the robots may go and when. The board has real authority over that, which is what makes it a board and not a consultation. The robot sits in on the meeting where its own limits get set. That seemed like the right room for it to be in.

Field workshop

The unglamorous half. Rain gets in, joints wear, something comes back from a day in town not working. Every repair is also a question the lab takes seriously: after enough of them, is this still the same robot the town has been getting used to?

The Oeste

Pears and vines run right to the edge of town, and the people working them hold expertise that has nothing to do with robotics. He is showing it a bunch of grapes. Whether they are ready is a judgement he could make at a glance and could not fully explain, and that is the kind of knowing the lab wants to understand.

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