The first Queenslander to be diagnosed with propionic acidemia, a metabolic condition that prevented her body from processing proteins properly, Ella Wrigley underwent a life-saving liver transplant at just 2½ years old.

Now seven, Ella lives an almost entirely normal life, with her new liver nicknamed R2-D2.

Her mother, Amanda Murphy, explained that a few years after the surgery, on the anniversary of her life-saving transplant, Ella was asked what she wanted to name her new liver.

“R2-D2,” she said.

The family’s lives were turned upside down when Ella was born with the rare condition, as doctors struggled to understand what was involved.

“Depending on the stats you’re looking at it, it’s either one in 80,000 or one in 100,000 [people diagnosed],” Ms Murphy said.

“She was the only person in Queensland with it — she’s certainly the only person in Queensland who received a liver transplant for it.

“She scored the dodgy end of the gene pool — her father and I both carry a bad gene and when we’ve had Ella, we’ve both passed on the bad gene.”

Having undergone the surgery and fully recovered, Ella now lives an almost entirely normal life, although, her mum said, there will always be some challenges as so little is known about the long-term effectiveness of a liver transplant.

A recent chance encounter between Amanda and Dr Sue Keay, the chief operating officer for QUT’s Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, sparked an invitation for Ella to visit some real-life robots.

“We were both at ABC Radio at the time and she overheard that Ella had named her liver R2-D2, and the rest is history,” Amanda said.

Like Ella, Dr Keay has a life-long love of Star Wars after her own father, a physicist focusing on astronomy, took her to see the original movie in 1977.

Dr Keay still owns toy Star Wars models she purchased after seeing that movie, with her own love of R2-D2 helping spark a career in robotic research.

On Thursday, R2-D2 and Ella, along with her mum and sister Ava, spent the morning at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision at QUT’s Garden Point campus with Dr Keay.

Ella has been following in her older sister’s footsteps, both girls developing a love of robotics and STEM at school.

Touring the centre on Thursday during National Science Week, Ella and Ava met Pepper, a social robot who strolled around the labs with them.

Ella quickly fell in love with Pepper, testing out the robot’s ability to identify people, toy cars and horses, while walking through the lab visiting other robots.

A robot capable of harvesting capsicums, an arm designed to pick up and release items such as teddy bears and soft items, and an underwater robot created to care for crown-of-thorns starfish, were just some of the robots Ella and Ava met.

The Australian Centre for Robotic Vision is the first international research lab of its kind, with 120 researchers on campus, nationally and internationally studying robot vision.

The centre is developing new approaches and data that will have impacts across social, agricultural, medical robots and more.

Ella said her favourite robot in the Star Wars universe was BB-8, the little orange-and-white ball robot that was the first fully functioning robot made for the movies.

In the real world, away from science fiction, robotic development is still a growing field, with Pepper just one example of a social robot trained to identify and interact with people.

As Ella wandered around the centre, Pepper spoke to people, turned and moved as requested, and finally warned that her batteries were getting low — a problem the real R2-D2 never mentioned.

Dr Keay said Townsville Hospital was conducting a trial with a Pepper robot to interact with people and provide information on flu vaccinations.

She said the applications for robots in health were many and varied, from the ultra-precise robots capable of performing delicate surgery beyond the ability of human surgeons, to collecting and providing basic information.

While Ella gave instructions to Pepper to turn left, right, forward and back and asked her questions, Dr Keay said the robots had a great deal of potential still untapped.

“We would love to be able to do some stuff more locally but we don’t quite have the connections yet,” Dr Keay said.

“They’re going to try a concierge [robot], which is really just about giving information about where things are in the hospital, but as Ella is discovering there, we’d like to be able to try to take that further.”

Ella said she named her liver R2-D2 “because that’s what I wanted to call him”, and her favourite Star Wars character was now BB-8, although she did go to her birthday party dressed as Darth Vader.

And her favourite robot of the day’s tour?

“Pepper … she’s funny because she sometimes can be stupid,” Ella said.