In science fiction movies, when robots talk to one another it’s not really a “language” as much as a stream of beeps or long strings of binary. Even so, one group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they’ve taught them how to invent and use spoken language.

The goal of the research is to understand how language evolves and develops naturally over time. Since it’s impossible to find two humans who have no language and experiment with them to see how they invent one, the University of Queensland and the Queensland University of Technology researchers decided to use robots instead. The robots, called LingoDroids, are equipped with microphones, speakers, cameras, range finders, and sonar that they use to map their surroundings and speak to one another.

Once the LingoDroids have their bearings, two of them are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don’t share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn’t speak their language.

The LingoDroids also question one another about the locations they’ve seen. By talking about places they’ve seen or experienced in abstract terms, the robots can invent additional words to describe distance and time required to move between places. Using this method, two LingoDroids used by the researchers managed to map out 5-meter-wide maze all by themselves, complete with agreed-upon names for different places.

Before you start worrying that these little robots are secretly plotting the demise of the human race, the researchers have plans for them. They created the LingoDroids to study language, but they’re also looking for ways to make communication between humans easier, and even to streamline communication between humans and machines.

The researchers want to use the techniques they’ve observed to get the robots talking about things in more abstract terms, like the difficulty involved in getting from place to place, which means they could one day understand and help a human that’s looking for directions that avoid a “bad part of town,” or a route with the least difficult terrain. In the future, robots that can understand language as an abstract concept could just as easily understand the connotations and hidden meanings of the words we use every day. They could also use that knowledge to communicate back to us. Imagine wondering if your ATM really meant “have a nice day,” or if it was being sarcastic.

The only danger here is that robots will be so good at developing their own shared language that they might outpace humans at being able to understand one another. A world full of robots that understand information and abstract concepts could be a world full of artificial intelligences secretly laughing behind our backs for our fascination with cat pictures on the internet.

Read more at IEEE Spectrum