I personally think that if we create robots with a sufficient understanding of the world, they will necessarily be self-aware and "conscious". Those are just emergent properties of a sufficient understanding of the world, it seems to me. You might think that's not true. Asimov's robots are purely "logical" (but not reasonable) and don't seem conscious, they don't have free will... But robots like that might never exist. They'd be too rigid to deal with the complexities of this world in any kind of useful way. For robots to be sufficiently capable, they'll need a more fluid, more "natural" and less "predictable" kind of intelligence.