Robot

For other uses, see Robot (disambiguation).

Intro 1: In practical usage, a robot is an autonomous or semi-autonomous device which performs its tasks either by direct human control, partial control with human supervision, or completely autonomously. Robots are typically used to do tasks that are too dull (repetitive), dirty, or dangerous for humans. Industrial robots used in manufacturing lines used to be the most common form of robots, but that has recently been replaced by consumer robots cleaning floors and mowing lawns. Other applications include toxic waste cleanup, underwater and space exploration, surgery, mining, search and rescue, and mine finding. Robots are also finding their way into entertainment and home health care.

Intro 2: A robot is a mechanical device that can perform preprogrammed physical tasks. Some robotic devices, such as the robotic arm of the space shuttle, act under direct human control. Other robots act autonomously, under the control of a preprogrammed computer. Certain robots, such as the space shuttle arm, are used to perform tasks that are too difficult or dangerous for humans to engage in directly. Others, including those used in automobile production, have made it possible to automate repetitive tasks and to lower the cost of performing them relative to direct human involvement.

The word robot is also used to describe an intelligent mechanical device constructed in human form. This type of robot is common in science fiction, but major breakthroughs will need to be made in the field of artificial intelligence before we can produce a robot that even begins to resemble the robots of fiction.

Finally, bots are sometimes referred to as robots, because they perform mundane, repetitive tasks.

A humanoid robot manufactured by Toyota "playing" a trumpet

Defining a robot

In common parlance, the word robot refers to any machine that mimics some of the actions of a human (biomimicry), in the physical or mental sense. More precisely, the term robot is usually applied to a machine equipped with a computer that acts as a "brain," giving it the ability to move and perform physical tasks. The computer is usually re-programmable, so that the robot's actions can be modified by altering the computer program.

Engineers have constructed robots in many different forms. For instance, humanoid robots mimic the human form and ways of moving, while various industrial robots appear in forms that are dictated by their functions. Robots can be placed in different groups, including mobile robots (such as autonomous vehicles), manipulator robots (such as industrial robots), and self-reconfigurable robots, which can conform themselves to the task at hand.

Some robots are under direct human control, including remotely controlled bomb-disposal robots, robotic arms, and shuttles. Others may be given a high degree of their own decision-making ability, provided by artificial intelligence systems. The majority of robots, however, fall between these two extremes and are controlled by pre-programmed computers. These robots may include feedback loops, so that they can interact with their environment but do not display actual intelligence.

Not every machine that contains a computer is considered a robot. For instance, the modern automobile is a movable machine containing a computer, but it is not considered a robot because the computer makes only minor adjustments, while the human driver controls most of the vehicle's movements through mechanical systems. Also, a desktop computer is not considered a robot because it does not have a moving body to perform physical operations outside itself.

History

The idea of artificial people dates at least as far back as the ancient legend of Cadmus, who sowed dragon teeth that turned into soldiers, and the myth of Pygmalion, whose statue of Galatea came to life. In classical mythology, the deformed god of metalwork (Vulcan or Hephaestus) created mechanical servants, ranging from intelligent, golden handmaidens to more utilitarian three-legged tables that could move about under their own power. Jewish legend tells of the Golem, a clay statue animated by Kabbalistic magic. Similarly, in the Younger Edda, Norse mythology tells of a clay giant, Mökkurkálfi or Mistcalf, constructed to aid the troll Hrungnir in a duel with Thor, the God of Thunder.

The word Robot was introduced by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. which was written in 1920 (See also Robots in literature for details of the play).

Concepts akin to today's robot can be found as long ago as 450B.C.E. when the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum postulated a mechanical bird he called "The Pigeon" which was propelled by steam. Al-Jazari (1136-1206) an Ortoqid (Artuk) Turkish inventor designed and constructed automatic machines such as water clocks, kitchen appliances and musical automats powered by water (See one of his works at [1]).

One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci in around 1495. Da Vinci's notebooks, rediscovered in the 1950s, contain detailed drawings of a mechanical knight able to sit up, wave its arms and move its head and jaw. The design is likely to be based on his anatomical research recorded in the Vitruvian Man. It is not known whether he attempted to build the robot (see: Leonardo's robot).

The first known functioning robot was created in 1738 by Jacques de Vaucanson, who made an android that played the flute, as well as a mechanical duck that reportedly ate and defecated.

Many consider the first robot in the modern sense to be a teleoperated boat, similar to a modern ROV, devised by Nikola Tesla and demonstrated at an 1898 exhibition in Madison Square Garden. Based on his patent 613,809 for "teleautomation", Tesla hoped to develop the "wireless torpedo" into an automated weapon system for the US Navy.

In the thirties, Westinghouse made a humanoid robot known as Elektro. It was exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs while the first electronic autonomous robots were created by Grey Walter at Bristol University, England in 1948.

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Robots have frequently appeared as characters in works of literature and the first use of the word "robot" in literature can be found in Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), written in 1920. Isaac Asimov has written many volumes of science fiction focusing on robots in numerous forms and guises [2]. His three laws of robotics have become particularly well known for codifying a simple set of behaviors for robots to remain at the service of their human creators.

Numerous words for different types of robots are now used in literature. Robot has come to mean mechanical humans, while android is used for organic artificial humans and cyborg or "bionic man" for a human form that is a mixture of organic and mechanical parts. Organic artificial humans have also been referred to as "constructs" (or "biological constructs"). ^{[citation needed]}

Contemporary uses of robots

File:Industrial Robotics in car production.jpg

KUKA Industrial Robots assembling a vehicle underbody

Robots are growing in complexity and their use in industry is becoming more widespread. The main use of robots has so far been in the automation of mass production industries, where the same, definable, tasks must be performed repeatedly in exactly the same fashion. Car production is the primary example of the employment of large and complex robots for producing products. Robots are used in that process for the painting, welding and assembly of the cars. Robots are good for such tasks because the tasks can be accurately defined and must be performed the same every time, with little need for feedback to control the exact process being performed. Industrial Robots can be manufactured in a wide range of sizes and so can handle much larger tasks than a human could.

Robots are also useful in environments which are unpleasant or dangerous for humans to work in, for example the cleaning of toxic waster, bomb disposal, work in space or underwater and in mining.

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are moveable robots that used in large facilities such as warehouses, hospitals [3] [4] and container ports, for the movement of goods, or even for safety and security patrols. Such vehicles follow markers or guides to navigate around the location and can be programmed to move between places to deliver goods or patrol a certain area.

Domestic robots are now available for performing simple tasks such as vacuum cleaning and grass cutting. By the end of 2004 over 1,000,000 vacuum cleaner units had been sold [5]. Examples of domestic robots are Sony's Aibo and irobot's Scooba and Roomba robots.

Humanoid robots are in development with the aim of being able to provide robotic functions in a form that may be more aesthetically pleasing to customers, thereby increasing the likelihood of them being accepted in society. These robots fall within a field known as social robots which aim to interact and provide companionship to people. Example of social robots are ludobot and Wakamaru.

Current developments

The development of a robot with a natural human or animal gait is incredibly difficult and requires a large amount of computational power [6]. Now that background technologies of behavior, navigation and path planning have been solved using basic wheeled robots, roboticists are moving on to develop walking robots (eg. SIGMO, QRIO, Asimo & Hubo). This field of work is known as Passive dynamics.

Initial work has focused on multi-legged robots (eg. Aibo), such as hexapods [7], as they are statically stable and so are easier to work with, whereas a bipedal robot must be able to balance. The balancing problem is taken to an extreme by the Robotic unicycle. A problem with the development of robots with natural gaits is that human and animal bodies utilize a very large number of muscles in movement and replicating all of those mechanically is very difficult and expensive. This field of robot research has become known as Biomorphic robotics.

Progress is being made in the field of feedback and tactile sensor which allow a robot to sense their actions and adjust their behavior accordingly. This is vital to enable robots to perform complex physical tasks that require some active control in response to the situation.

File:Robot hand holding an egg.jpg

Robotic manipulators can be very precise, but only when a task can be fully described. Here, a robotic hand holds an egg.

Medical robotics is a growing field and recently regulatory approval has been granted for the use of robots in minimally invasive procedures. Robots are being considered for use in performing highly delicate, accurate surgery, or to allow a surgeon who is located remotely from their patient to perform a procedure using a robot controlled remotely.

Experimental winged robots and other examples exploiting biomimicry are also in early development. So-called "nanomotors" and "smart wires" are expected to drastically simplify motive power, while in-flight stabilization seems likely to be improved by extremely small gyroscopes. A significant driver of this work is military research into spy technologies.

Future prospects

Some scientists believe that robots will be able to approximate human-like intelligence in the first half of the 21st century. The cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener discussed the issue of robots replacing humans in fields of work in his book The human use of human beings (1950), in which he speculated that robots taking over human jobs may initially lead to growing unemployment and social turmoil, but that in the medium-term it might bring increased material wealth to people in most nations. Human perception and acceptance of robots has been considered and has led to the proposition of the Uncanny Valley in analyzing human feelings about robots.

Robotics will probably continue its spread in offices and homes, replacing "dumb" appliances with smart robotic equivalents. Domestic robots capable of performing many household tasks, described in science fiction stories and coveted by the public in the 1960s, are likely to be perfected.

There is likely to be some degree of convergence between humans and robots. Some humans are already cyborgs with some body parts and even parts of the nervous system replaced by artificial analogues, such as Pacemakers. In many cases the same technology might be used both in robotics and in medicine.

Dangers and Fears

Although robots have yet to develop to a stage where they could pose a threat or danger to society [8], various books and films have expressed fears and concerns about robots. The principal theme is that robots exceed human intelligence and our ability to act, after which they take over or destroy the human race.

Frankenstein (1818), sometimes called the first science fiction novel, has become synonymous with the theme of a robot or monster advancing beyond its creator. Probably the best-known contemporary author in the area of robots is Isaac Asimov, who has placed them and their interaction with society at the center of many of his works. Of particular interest are Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

Currently, the greatest threat may take the form of malicious programming of robots, particularly large industrial robots. The power and size of industrial robots means that they are capable of inflicting severe injury if programmed incorrectly or used in an unsafe manner. One such incident occurred on July 21, 1984, when an industrial worker crushed a man to death. That incident was an accident, but it demonstrates that there are certain risks of working with robots.

Robotics

The word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction story, "Liar!" (1941). The Wiktionary defines robotics as the science and technology of robots, including their design, manufacture, and application. The field of robotics requires a working knowledge of electronics, mechanics, and software, and a person working in this field is called a roboticist.

Although the appearance and capabilities of robots vary vastly, all robots share the features of a mechanical, movable structure under some form of control. The structure of a robot is usually mostly mechanical and can be called chain (its functionality being akin to the skeleton of a body). The chain is formed of links (its bones), actuators (its muscles) and joints (which may allow much more freedom of movement than the hinge joints of the human skeleton). Additional components may include sensors to give information about the surroundings or the robot itself (eg the position of its joints) and motors to move the actuators.

The actions of a robot can be split into three distinct phases - perception, processing and action. The consideration of these phases and their interaction is considered in light of the three robotic paradigms. One of the most important aspects of robot construction is the study and planning of the robot's motion. The study of movement is known as kinematics, which deals with aspects of redundancy (different ways to perform the same movement), collision avoidance and singularity avoidance. In reality inverse kinematics is a truer description since the aim of the required movement is known and the positions of the robot's joints must be calculated to achieve that movement. The analysis of the required movement may reveal that there are none, one or many ways of the robot achieving that movement. Once the movement has been analyzed dynamics then come into play to determine the most efficient way of achieving the movement. Factors that affect the efficiency of a robot may include energy conservation, time needed, and space needed.

Robot competitions

Competitions for robots are gaining popularity and competitions now exist catering for a wide variety of robot builders ranging from schools to research institutions. Robots compete at a wide range of tasks including combat, playing games, maze solving, performing tasks [9] and navigational exercises (eg. DARPA Grand Challenge) [10] [11]

Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), created the world's leading high school robotics competition. FIRST provides a varsity-like competitive forum that inspires in young people, their schools and communities an appreciation of science and technology.

Their robotics competition is a multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. Their outreach includes the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), the FIRST Vex Challenge (FVC), the FIRST Lego League (FLL), and Junior FIRST Lego League (JFLL). These four competitons are each geared separately at students aged 14-18, 14-18, 9-14, and 6-9 respectively. In 2005, there were over 100,000 students and 40,000 adult mentors from around the world involved in at least one of FIRST's competitions.

Unlike the Robot sumo wrestling competitions that take place regularly in some venues, or the Battlebots competitions on TV, these competitions include the creation of a robot. For the FLL program, the robots are entirely autonomous; the FVC competition involves separate autonomous and driver control matches; and the FRC competition involves an autonomous period (10 or 15 seconds) followed by a driver control in their matches.

RoboCup is a competitive organization dedicated to developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050. There are many different leagues ranging from computer simulation, to full-size humanoid robots.

RoboCup Junior is similar to RoboCup. RoboCup Junior is a competition for primary and secondary school aged students. RoboCup Junior includes three competitions:

• soccer - two robots per team play autonomously in a game of soccer
• rescue - an obstacle course in which a robot must follow a line to retrieve an object, and bring it back to safety as fast as possible
• dance - robots are designed to dance to music and are judged on criteria such as creativity and costumes

As is the case with RoboCup, all robots are designed and developed solely by the students and act autonomously without any form of remote control or human intervention.

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition for robotic vehicles to complete an under-200 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert. The unclaimed 2004 prize was $1,000,000. The farthest any participant got was only 7.4 miles. However, the 2005 prize of $2,000,000 was claimed by Stanford University. In this race, four vehicles successfully completed the race. This is a testament to how fast robotic vision and navigation are improving.

The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) is a competition for autonomous ground vehicles that must traverse outdoor obstacle courses without any human interaction. This international competition sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), is a student design competition at the university level and has held annual competitions since 1992.

The two AAAI Grand Challenges focus on Human Robot Interaction, with one being a robot attending and delivering a conference talk, the other being operator-interaction challenges in rescue robotics.

The Centennial Challenges are NASA prize contests for non-government funded technological achievements, including robotics, by US citizens.

In Micromouse competitions, small robots try to solve a maze in the fastest time.

The popularity of the TV shows Robot Wars Robotica and Battlebots, of college level robot-sumo wrestling competitions, the success of "smart bombs" and UCAVs in armed conflicts, grass-eating "gastrobots" in Florida, and the creation of a slug-eating robot in England, suggest that the fear of an artificial life form doing harm, or competing with natural wild life, is not an illusion. The worldwide Green Parties in 2002 were asking for public input on extending their existing policies against such competition, as part of more general biosafety and biosecurity concerns. It appears that, like Aldous Huxley's concerns about human cloning, questions Karel Čapek raised eighty years earlier in science fiction have become real debates.

The Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory (http://maslab.csail.mit.edu) is one of the few college-level vision-based autonomous robotics competition in the world. Conducted by and for MIT undergraduates, this competition requires multithreaded applications of image processing, robotic movements, and target ball deposition. The robots are run with debian linux and run on an independent OrcBoard platform that facilitates sensor-hardware additions and recognition.

See also

Robot Portal

Classes of robots

For classes and types of robots see Category:Robots.

Research areas associated with robotics

• Behavior based robotics and Subsumption architecture
• Developmental robotics
• Epigenetic robotics
• Evolutionary robotics
• Cognitive robotics
• Robot control
• Automated planning and scheduling
• Mechatronics
• Neural networks
• Cybernetics
• Artificial consciousness
• Telerobotics / Telepresence
• Nanotechnology and MEMS
• Swarm robotics
• Robot software

Additional robot topics

• Carbon chauvinism (see: Alternative biochemistry)
• Clanking replicators
• Disabled robotics: Artificial powered exoskeleton
• Gynoid
• List of fictional robots and androids
• Microbotics
• Rapid prototyping
• Robotic mapping
• Robots in literature
• Utility fog

External links

Media coverage and articles

• Robot navigation and vision system – BetterHumans, 9 January 2003
• Robotic Nation by Marshall Brain
• The Legal Rights of Robots by Robert A. Freitas
• Artificial chromosomes in robots February 2005

General information and non-profit organizations

• Robot Tutorials for Beginners
• Player/Stage Project A very popular Free Software robot interface and simulation system, used for robotics research and teaching worldwide.
• EURON: the European Robotics Research Network which currently assembles over 150 robotics research institutes and robotics companies in Europe.
• ALA – The Association for Laboratory Automation
• LRIG – The Laboratory Robotics Interest Group
• SeattleRobotics.org – The Seattle Robotics Society, one of the oldest and largest hobby robotics groups in the world.
• International Federation of Robotics
• GoRobotics.net Robotics resource website - robot news, projects, books, and club listings.
• Eurobot, an international amateur robotics contest
• robots.net – Hobbyist and professional robotics site with news, robot gallery, project descriptions, and articles
• Open Automaton Project at sourceforge.net
• The Robot Hall of Fame
• The OrionWiki – Specifically aimed at technical content; also: downloads and personal spaces for robot builders/hobbyists
• AmorphicRobotWorks(ARW) – A group working to create robotic performances and installations
• www.robot.org.uk – A guide for robot builders with lists of reviewed books, magazines, approved parts suppliers, etc.
• Robodock – A theater festival in The Netherlands heavily inspired by robotica.
• Robots Forum Discussion forum for Robot builders
• Cal Poly Robotics Club – Site includes project descriptions, tutorials, and development tools.
• A brief history of robotics
• Lucy the Orangutan, based on principles of the nervous system
• Endtas robotics community website
• Compilation video of some amazing robots Compilation video (30min) of some amazing robots as qrio, asimo, HRP2, Partner robot, HAL,...
• HobbyRobotics.org provides reviews and links to information for hobby roboticists.

Commercial projects

• PlusJack – John Deere six-legged Forest Harvester
• RoboRealm – Free Robotic Vision Software
• trueforce.com – Technical information on robotics, with a list of suppliers
• The Robofolio – An excellent portal for robot hobbyists.
• Robot Information Central – Link directory at a commercial site
• Robot Universe – Link directory at a commercial site
• robots.com – Pay per click directory of links with some items related to robotics
• BGA architecture and robotic software
• Fractal Robots Information on Fractal Robots
• Hubo, a low cost humanoid robot launched in Korea

Credits

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