Self-Awareness in Robots

As I was leaving work to go to lunch on Friday, this old guy walked in and started asking questions about some of our technologies. He said he was working on some project with university students to give robots senses like smell, taste, etc (he was curious if we had any sensors for smell sense we used to make/develop oxygen sensors and such.) He also said they were working on self-replicating robots. Pretty cool shit IMO.