Introduction To Robots
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a robot?
For many people it is a machine that imitates a human—like the androids in Star Wars, Terminator and Star Trek: The Next Generation. However much these robots capture our imagination, such robots still only inhabit Science Fiction. People still haven't been able to give a robot enough 'common sense' to reliably interact with a dynamic world. However, Rodney Brooks and his team at MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab are working on creating such humanoid robots.
The type of robots that you will encounter most frequently are robots that do work that is too dangerous, boring, onerous, or just plain nasty. Most of the robots in the world are of this type. They can be found in auto, medical, manufacturing and space industries. In fact, there are over a million of these type of robots working for us today.
Some robots like the Mars Rover Sojourner and the upcoming Mars Exploration Rover, or the underwater robot Caribou help us learn about places that are too dangerous for us to go. While other types of robots are just plain fun for kids of all ages. Popular toys such as Teckno, Polly or AIBO ERS-220 seem to hit the store shelves every year around Christmas time.
And as much fun as robots are to play with, robots are even much more fun to build. In Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte tells a wonderful story about an eight year old, pressed during a televised premier of MITMedia Lab's LEGO/Logo work at Hennigan School. A zealous anchor, looking for a cute sound bite, kept asking the child if he was having fun playing with LEGO/Logo. Clearly exasperated, but not wishing to offend, the child first tried to put her off. After her third attempt to get him to talk about fun, the child, sweating under the hot television lights, plaintively looked into the camera and answered, "Yes it is fun, but it's hard fun."
But what exactly is a robot?
As strange as it might seem, there really is no standard definition for a robot. However, there are some essential characteristics that a robot must have and this might help you to decide what is and what is not a robot. It will also help you to decide what features you will need to build into a machine before it can count as a robot.
A robot has these essential characteristics:
- Sensing First of all your robot would have to be able to sense its surroundings. It would do this in ways that are not unsimilar to the way that you sense your surroundings. Giving your robot sensors: light sensors (eyes), touch and pressure sensors (hands), chemical sensors (nose), hearing and sonar sensors (ears), and taste sensors (tongue) will give your robot awareness of its environment.
- Movement A robot needs to be able to move around its environment. Whether rolling on wheels, walking on legs or propelling by thrusters a robot needs to be able to move. To count as a robot either the whole robot moves, like the Sojourner or just parts of the robot moves, like the Canada Arm.
- Energy A robot needs to be able to power itself. A robot might be solar powered, electrically powered, battery powered. The way your robot gets its energy will depend on what your robot needs to do.
- Intelligence A robot needs some kind of "smarts." This is where programming enters the pictures. A programmer is the person who gives the robot its 'smarts.' The robot will have to have some way to receive the program so that it knows what it is to do.
Well it is a system that contains sensors, control systems, manipulators, power supplies and software all working together to perform a task. Designing, building, programming and testing a robots is a combination of physics, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, structural engineering, mathematics and computing. In some cases biology, medicine, chemistry might also be involved. A study of robotics means that students are actively engaged with all of these disciplines in a deeply problem-posing problem-solving environment.
A Short History of Robots
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| First robot |
Robot Timeline
- ~270BC an ancient Greek engineer named Ctesibus made organs and water clocks with movable figures.
- 1818 - Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" which was about a frightening artificial lifeform created by Dr. Frankenstein.
- 1921 - The term "robot" was first used in a play called "R.U.R." or "Rossum's Universal Robots" by the Czech writer Karel Capek. The plot was simple: man makes robot then robot kills man!
- 1941 - Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov first used the word "robotics" to describe the technology of robots and predicted the rise of a powerful robot industry.
- 1942 - Asimov wrote "Runaround", a story about robots which contained the "Three Laws of Robotics":
- A robot may not injure a human, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders it by human beings except where such orders would conflic with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict withe the First or Second Law.
- 1948 - "Cybernetics", an influence on artificial intelligence research was published by Norbert Wiener
- 1956 - George Devol and Joseph Engelberger formed the world's first robot company.
- 1959 - Computer-assisted manufacturingg was demonstrated at the Servomechanisms Lab at MIT.
- 1961 - The first industrial robot was online in a General Motors automobile factory in New Jersey. It was called UNIMATE.
- 1963 - The first artificial robotic arm to be controlled by a computer was designed. The Rancho Arm was designed as a tool for the handicapped and it's six joints gave it the flexibility of a human arm.
- 1965 - DENDRAL was the first expert system or program designed to execute the accumulated knowledge of subject experts.
- 1968 - The octopus-like Tentacle Arm was developed by Marvin Minsky.
- 1969 - The Stanford Arm was the first electrically powered, computer-controlled robot arm.
- 1970 - Shakey was introduced as the first mobile robot controlled by artificial intellence. It was produced by SRI International.
- 1974 - A robotic arm (the Silver Arm) that performed small-parts assembly using feedback from touch and pressure sensors was designed.
- 1979 - The Standford Cart crossed a chair-filled room without human assistance. The cart had a tv camera mounted on a rail which took pictures from multiple angles and relayed them to a computer. The computer analyzed the distance between the cart and the obstacles.
Types of Robots
Robots can be found in the manufacturing industry, the military, space exploration, transportation, and medical applications. Below are just some of the uses for robots.Robots on Earth
Typical industrial robots do jobs that are difficult, dangerous or dull. They lift heavy objects, paint, handle chemicals, and perform assembly work. They perform the same job hour after hour, day after day with precision. They don't get tired and they don't make errors associated with fatigue and so are ideally suited to performing repetitive tasks. The major categories of industrial robots by mechanical structure are:- Cartesian robot /Gantry robot: Used for pick and place work, application of sealant, assembly operations, handling machine tools and arc welding. It's a robot whose arm has three prismatic joints, whose axes are coincident with a Cartesian coordinator.
- Cylindrical robot: Used for assembly operations, handling at machine tools, spot welding, and handling at diecasting machines. It's a robot whose axes form a cylindrical coordinate system.
- Spherical/Polar robot: Used for handling at machine tools, spot welding, diecasting, fettling machines, gas welding and arc welding. It's a robot whose axes form a polar coordinate system.
- SCARA robot: Used for pick and place work, application of sealant, assembly operations and handling machine tools. It's a robot which has two parallel rotary joints to provide compliance in a plane.
- Articulated robot: Used for assembly operations, diecasting, fettling machines, gas welding, arc welding and spray painting. It's a robot whose arm has at least three rotary joints.
- Parallel robot: One use is a mobile platform handling cockpit flight simulators. It's a robot whose arms have concurrent prismatic or rotary joints.
Industrial robots are found in a variety of locations including the automobile and manufacturing industries. Robots cut and shape fabricated parts, assemble machinery and inspect manufactured parts. Some types of jobs robots do: load bricks, die cast, drill, fasten, forge, make glass, grind, heat treat, load/unload machines, machine parts, handle parts, measure, monitor radiation, run nuts, sort parts, clean parts, profile objects, perform quality control, rivet, sand blast, change tools and weld. Outside the manufacturing world robots perform other important jobs. They can be found in hazardous duty service, CAD/CAM design and prototyping, maintenance jobs, fighting fires, medical applications, military warfare and on the farm.
Farmers drive over a billion slooooww tractor miles every year on the same ground. Their land is generally gentle, and proven robot navigation techniques can be applied to this environment. A robot agricultural harvester named Demeter is a model for commercializing mobile robotics technology. The Demeter harvester contains controllers, positioners, safeguards, and task software specialized to the needs commercial agriculture. 
Some robots are used to investigate hazardous and dangerous environments. The Pioneer robot is a remote reconnaissance system for structural analysis of the Chornobyl Unit 4 reactor building. Its major components are a teleoperated mobile robot for deploying sensor and sampling payloads, a mapper for creating photorealistic 3D models of the building interior, a coreborer for cutting and retrieving samples of structural materials, and a suite of radiation and other environmental sensors. An eight-legged, tethered, robot named Dante II descended into the active crater of Mt. Spurr, an Alaskan volcano 90 miles west of Anchorage. Dante II's mission was to rappel and walk autonomously over rough terrain in a harsh environment; receive instructions from remote operators; demonstrate sophisticated communications and control software; and determine how much carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide exist in the steamy gas emanating from fumaroles in the crater.
Via satellite, Dante II sent back visual information and other data, as well as received instruction from human operators at control stations in Anchorage, Washington D.C., and the NASA Ames Research Center near San Francisco. Dante II saves volcanologists from having to enter the craters of active volcanoes. It also demonstrates the technology necessary for a robot to explore the surface of the moon or planets. That is, the robot must be able to walk on rough terrain in a harsh environment, receive instructions from remote operators about where to go next, and reach those commanded goals autonomously. Robotic underwater rovers are used explore and gather information about many facets of our marine environment. One example of underwater exploration is Project Jeremy, a collaboration between NASA and Santa Clara University. Scientists sent an underwater telepresence remotely operated
vehicle (TROV) into the freezing Arctic Ocean waters to investigate the remains of a whaling fleet lost in 1871. The TROV was tethered to the surface boat Polar Star by a cable that carried power and instructions down to the robot and the robot returned video images up to the Polar Star. The TROV located two ships which it documented using stereoscopic video cameras and control mechanisms like the ones on the Mars Pathfinder. In addition to pictures, the TROV can also collect artifacts and gather information about the water conditions. By learning how to study extreme environments on earth, scientists will be better prepared to study environments on other planets. Robots in Space
Space-based robotic technology at NASA falls within three specific mission areas: exploration robotics, science payload maintenance, and on-orbit servicing. Related elements are terrestrial/commercial applications which transfer technologies generated from space telerobotics to the commercial sector and component technology which encompasses the development of joint designs, muscle wire, exoskeletons and sensor technology. Today, two important devices exist which are proven space robots. One is the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and the other is the Remote Manipulator System (RMS).
An ROV can be an unmanned spacecraft that remains in flight, a lander that makes contact with an extraterrestrial body and operates from a stationary position, or a rover that can move over terrain once it has landed. It is difficult to say exactly when early spacecraft evolved from simple automatons to robot explorers or ROVs. Even the earliest and simplest spacecraft operated with some preprogrammed functions monitored closely from Earth. One of the best known ROV's is the Sojourner rover that was deployed by the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. Several NASA centers are involved in developing planetary explorers and space-based robots. The most common type of existing robotic device is the robot arm
often used in industry and manufacturing. The mechanical arm recreates many of the movements of the human arm, having not only side-to-side and up-and-down motion, but also a full 360-degree circular motion at the wrist, which humans do not have. Robot arms are of two types. One is computer-operated and programmed for a specific function. The other requires a human to actually control the strength and movement of the arm to perform the task. To date, the NASA Remote Manipulator System (RMS) robot arm has performed a number of tasks on many space missions-serving as a grappler, a remote assembly device, and also as a positioning and anchoring device for astronauts working in space.
Future Robots
Not that robots of the future were supposed to be just serving drinks and building Twonkies. They had grimmer duties when their fleshy masters thrust blasters into their metal hands and sent them off to war.
Take this lot, for example, from The Defenders by Phillip K. Dick. In this story, the Earth has been devastated by decades of atomic war and the human race lives in huge underground bunkers while their robot soldiers battle it out on the surface. Turns out that the robots just waited until the last human hit the bunkers and then the lot of them downed rifles, kicked back, and whipped up a batch of daiquiris with no one the wiser. To coin a phrase, ten out of ten for style.
One of the strangest things that I discovered as I researched this section is that it is rather different than other aspects of Future Past. When it came to spaceships, aeroplanes, cars, and so forth, there was no end to speculative designs. It was easy to find Robert Goddard's spaceship design, an idea for an aeroplane with circular wings, or atomic-powered tanks, but robots were surprisingly thin on the ground, which is remarkable when you consider how ubiquitous they were supposed to be in the future landscape. Why so few blueprints or even projected views of what the mechanical man of tomorrow would look like? There were some, as we'll see, but nothing like the torrent of Moon landers and atomic pens. Given how so many vastly underestimated the problems of actually building a robot, it's hard to say if this dearth is due to having too little to go on or overweening confidence that metal men would come tumbling off the shelves any day now.
Whatever the reason, we still developed a very clear idea of what robots would be like in the 21st century, but in this case the source was largely that of pulp fiction and Hollywood rather than visionaries of the engineering world. Perhaps nature abhors even a speculative vacuum.
