http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14886421 interesting question, I think the problem is that we only have direct intra-personal experience of what consciousness is, as it is a subjective first person state, we assume consciousness in others but I don't see how there could be an objective, third person scientific test of consciousness as it is a personal perception, and the same would go for a robot.
The technical debate about objective knowledge of subjective phenomena is a separate issue from the question of what gives rise to consciousness. Given that we are biochemical machines which have consciousness, it is entriely reasonable to assume that an artificially created machine could also have consciousness. The question is, how would we know, and for that consciousness would need to be better defined. I see no reason why consciousness could not in principle be accurately described in computational terms. I suspect it is more a spectrum than an on/off switch.
