Robotics is the science and technology of robots, their design, manufacture, and application. Robotics requires a working knowledge of electronics, mechanics and software, and is usually accompanied by a large working knowledge of many subjects.
A person working in the field is 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 autonomous control. The structure of a robot is usually mostly mechanical and can be called a kinematic chain (its functionality being akin to the skeleton of the human body). The chain is formed of links (its bones), actuators (its muscles) and joints which can allow one or more degrees of freedom. Most contemporary robots use open serial chains in which each link connects the one before to the one after it. These robots are called serial robots and often resemble the human arm. Some robots, such as the Stewart platform, use closed parallel kinematic chains. Other structures, such as those that mimic the mechanical structure of humans, various animals and insects, are comparatively rare. However, the development and use of such structures in robots is an active area of research (e.g. biomechanics). Robots used as manipulators have an end effector mounted on the last link. This end effector can be anything from a welding device to a mechanical hand used to manipulate the environment.
A robotic arm is a robot manipulator, usually programmable, with similar functions to a human arm. The links of such a manipulator are connected by joints allowing either rotational motion (such as in an articulated robot) or translational (linear) displacement. The links of the manipulator can be considered to form a kinematic chain. The business end of the kinematic chain of the manipulator is called the end effector and it is analogous to the human hand. The end effector can be designed to perform any desired task such as welding, gripping, spinning etc., depending on the application. For example robot arms in automotive assembly lines perform a variety of tasks such as welding and parts rotation and placement during assembly.
In space the Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System also known as Canadarm or SRMS and its successor Canadarm2 are examples of multi degree of freedom robotic arms that have been used to perform a variety of tasks such as inspections of the Space Shuttle using a specially deployed boom with cameras and sensors attached at the end effector and satellite deployment and retrieval manoeuvres from the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle.
The robot arms can be autonomous or controlled manually and can be used to perform a variety of tasks with great accuracy.
The robotic arm can be fixed or mobile (i.e. wheeled) and can be designed for industrial or home applications.
Jobs which require speed, accuracy, reliability or endurance can be performed far better by a robot than a human. Hence many jobs in factories which were traditionally performed by people are now robotized. This has led to cheaper mass-produced goods, including automobiles and electronics. Robots have now been working in factories for more than fifty years, ever since the Unimate robot was installed to automatically remove hot metal from a die casting machine. Since then, factory automation in the form of large stationary manipulators has become the largest market for robots. The number of installed robots has grown faster and faster, and today there are more than 1 million robots in operation worldwide (Half of the robot population is located in Asia, 1/3 in Europe, and 16% in North America. Australasia and Africa each account for 1%.).
German KUKA Industrial robots doing vehicle under body assemblySome examples of factory robots:
Car production: This is now the primary example of factory automation. Over the last three decades automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A typical factory contains hundreds of industrial robots working on fully automated production lines - one robot for every ten human workers. On an automated production line a vehicle chassis is taken along a conveyor to be welded, glued, painted and finally assembled by a sequence of robot stations.
Packaging: Industrial robots are also used extensively for palletizing and packaging of manufactured goods, for example taking drink cartons from the end of a conveyor belt and placing them rapidly into boxes, or the loading and unloading of machining centers.
Electronics: Mass produced printed circuit boards (PCBs) are almost exclusively manufactured by pick and place robots, typically with SCARA manipulators, which remove tiny electronic components from strips or trays, and place them on to PCBs with great accuracy. Such robots can place several components per second (tens of thousands per hour), far out-performing a human in terms of speed, accuracy, and reliability.
HelpMate trackless pharmacy bot navigates autonomously to transport drugs, lab specimens, supplies and medical records.Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs): Mobile robots, following markers or wires in the floor, or using vision or lasers, are used to transport goods around large facilities, such as warehouses, container ports, or hospitals. Early AGV-style robots were limited to tasks that could be accurately defined and must be performed the same every time. Very little feedback or intelligence was required, and the robots may need only the most basic of exteroceptors to sense things in their environment, if any at all. However, newer AGV's, such as the Speci-Minder, ADAM , Tug , and PatrolBot Gofer qualify under the JARA definition of intelligent robots. They use some form of natural features recognition to navigate. Scanning lasers, stereovision or other means of sensing the environment in two- or three-dimensions is combined with standard dead-reckoning calculations in a probabilistic manner to continuously update the AGV's current location, eliminating cumulative error. This means that the Self-Guided Vehicle (SGV) can navigate a space autonomously once it has learned it or been provided with a map of it. Such new robots are able to operate in complex environments and perform non-repetitive and non-sequential tasks such as carrying tires to presses in factories, delivering masks in a semi-conductor lab, delivering specimens in hospitals and delivering goods in warehouses.
Dirty, dangerous, dull or inaccessible tasks
The Roomba domestic vacuum cleaner robot does a menial jobThere are many jobs which a human could perform better than a robot but for one reason or another the human either does not want to do it or cannot be present to do the job. The job may be too boring to bother with, for example domestic cleaning; or be too dangerous, for example exploring inside a volcanoThese jobs are known as the "dull, dirty, and dangerous" jobs. Other jobs are physically inaccessible. For example, exploring another planet, cleaning the inside of a long pipe or performing laparoscopic surgery.
Robots in the home: As their price falls, and their performance and computational ability rises, making them both affordable and sufficiently autonomous, robots are increasingly being seen in the home where they are taking on simple but unwanted jobs, such as vacuum cleaning, floor cleaning and lawn mowing. While they have been on the market for several years, 2006 saw an explosion in the number of domestic robots sold. By 2006, iRobot had sold more than 2 million vacuuming robots.[48] They tend to be relatively autonomous, usually only requiring a command to begin their job. They then proceed to go about their business in their own way. At such, they display a good deal of agency, and are considered intelligent robots.
A laparoscopic robotic surgery machine.Telerobots: When a human cannot be present on site to perform a job because it is dangerous, far away, or inaccessible, teleoperated robots, or telerobots are used. Rather than following a predetermined sequence of movements a telerobot is controlled from a distance by a human operator. The robot may be in another room or another country, or may be on a very different scale to the operator. A laparoscopic surgery robot such as da Vinci allows the surgeon to work inside a human patient on a relatively small scale compared to open surgery, significantly shortening recovery time. An interesting use of a telerobot is by the author Margaret Atwood, who has recently started using a robot pen (the Longpen) to sign books remotely. The Longpen is similar to the Autopen of the 1800s. This saves the financial cost and physical inconvenience of traveling to book signings around the world. At the other end of the spectrum, iRobot ConnectR robot is designed to be used by anyone to stay in touch with family or friends from far away. One robot in use today, Intouchhealth's RP-7 remote presence robot, is being used by doctors to communicate with patients, allowing the doctor to be anywhere in the world. This increases the number of patients a doctor can monitor.
Military robots: Teleoperated robot aircraft, like the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, are increasingly being used by the military. These robots can be controlled from anywhere in the world allowing an army to search terrain, and even fire on targets, without endangering those in control.Many of these robots are teleoperated, but others are being developed that can make decisions automatically; choosing where to fly or selecting and engaging enemy targets.Hundreds of robots such as iRobot's Packbot and the Foster-Miller TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. military to defuse roadside bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in an activity known as Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD).Autonomous robots such as MDARS and Seekur are being developed to perform security and surveillance tasks at military facilities to address manpower shortages as well as keeping troops out of harm's way. The Crusher Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) is being developed to perform military missions autonomously .
Elder Care: The population is aging in many countries, especially Japan, meaning that there are increasing numbers of elderly people to care for but relatively fewer young people to care for them. Humans make the best carers, but where they are unavailable, robots are gradually being introduced.
Unconventional Robots
Much of the research in robotics focuses not on specific industrial tasks, but on investigations into new types of robot, alternative ways to think about or design robots, and new ways to manufacture them. It is expected that these new types of robot will be able to solve real world problems when they are finally realized.
A nanocar made from a single molecule Nanorobots: Nanorobotics is the still largely hypothetical technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a nanometer (10-9 meters). Also known as nanobots or nanites, they would be constructed from molecular machines. So far, researchers have mostly produced only parts of these complex systems, such as bearings, sensors, and Synthetic molecular motors, but functioning robots have also been made such as the entrants to the Nanobot Robocup contest. Researchers also hope to be able to create entire robots as small as viruses or bacteria, which could perform tasks on a tiny scale. Possible applications include micro surgery (on the level of individual cells), utility fog, manufacturing, weaponry and cleaning.Some people have suggested that if there were nanobots which could reproduce, the earth would turn into "grey goo", while others argue that this hypothetical outcome is nonsense.
Soft Robots: Most robots, indeed most man made machines of any kind, are made from hard, stiff materials; especially metal and plastic. This is in contrast to most natural organisms, which are mostly soft tissues.
This difference has not been lost on robotic engineers at Tufts University, where professors Barry Trimmer and David Kaplan recently gained international attention for creating the world's first soft-bodied robot from silicone. Made operationally possible by soft actuators (air muscles, electroactive polymers, ferrofluids), Trimmer and Kaplan's SoftBot exhibits soft behaviours (fuzzy logic, neural networks). Soft-bodied robots look, feel, and behave differently from traditional hard robots, and as such, their applications are less limited. Currently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York City, Trimmer and Kaplan hope the SoftBot will help "spark revolutions in medicine, the military and even outer-space exploration." Kaplan believes that, among other medical applications, soft-bodied robots could replace tiny cameras that patients swallow to help diagnose diseases.
Molecubes in motionReconfigurable Robots: A few researchers have investigated the possibility of creating robots which can alter their physical form to suit a particular task, like the fictional T-1000. Real robots are nowhere near that sophisticated however, and mostly consist of a small number of cube shaped units, which can move relative to their neighbours, for example SuperBot. Algorithms have been designed in case any such robots become a reality.
A swarm of robots from the Open-source micro-robotic project Swarm robots: Inspired by colonies of insects such as ants and bees, researchers hope to create very large swarms (thousands) of tiny robots which together perform a useful task, such as finding something hidden, cleaning, or spying. Each robot would be quite simple, but the emergent behaviour of the swarm would be more complex. The whole set of robots can be considered as one single distributed system, in the same way an ant colony can be considered a superorganism. They would exhibit swarm intelligence. The largest swarms so far created include the iRobot swarm, and the Open-source micro-robotic project swarm, which are being used to research collective behaviours. Swarms are also more resistant to failure. Whereas one large robot may fail and ruin the whole mission, the swarm can continue even if several robots fail. This makes them attractive for space exploration missions, where failure can be extremely costly.
Evolutionary Robots: is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to help design robots, especially the body form, or motion and behaviour controllers. In a similar way to natural evolution, a large population of robots is allowed to compete in some way, or their ability to perform a task is measured using a fitness function. Those that perform worst are removed from the population, and replaced by a new set, which have new behaviours based on those of the winners. Over time the population improves, and eventually a satisfactory robot may appear. This happens without any direct programming of the robots by the researchers. Researchers use this method both to create better robots, and to explore the nature of evolution. Because the process often requires many generations of robots to be simulated, this technique may be run entirely or mostly in simulation, then tested on real robots once the evolved algorithms are good enough.
Virtual Reality: Robotics also has application in the design of virtual reality interfaces. Specialized robots are in widespread use in the haptic research community. These robots, called "haptic interfaces" allow touch-enabled user interaction with real and virtual environments. Robotic forces allow simulating the mechanical properties of "virtual" objects, which users can experience through their sense of touch.
Dangers and fears
Although current robots are not believed to have developed to the stage where they pose any threat or danger to society, fears and concerns about robots have been repeatedly expressed in a wide range of books and films. The principal theme is the robots' intelligence and ability to act could exceed that of humans, that they could develop a conscience and a motivation to take over or destroy the human race. (See The Terminator, Runaway, Robocop, The Replicators (Stargate), The Matrix, I, Robot) Robots could be dangerous if they were programmed to kill or if they are programmed to be so smart that they make their own software, build their own hardware to upgrade themselves or if they change their own source code.
Frankenstein (1818), often 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 author to have worked in this area is Isaac Asimov who placed robots and their interaction with society at the center of many of his works. Of particular interest are Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Currently, malicious programming or unsafe use of robots may be the biggest danger. Although industrial robots may be smaller and less powerful than other industrial machines, they are just as capable of inflicting severe injury on humans. However, since a robot can be programmed to move in different trajectories depending on its task, its movement can be unpredictable for a person standing in its reach. Therefore, most industrial robots operate inside a security fence which separates them from human workers. Manuel De Landa has theorized that humans are at a critical and significant juncture where humans have allowed robots, "smart missiles," and autonomous bombs equipped with artificial perception to make decisions about killing us. He believes this represents an important and dangerous trend where humans are transferring more of our cognitive structures into our machines.Even without malicious programming, a robot, especially a future model moving freely in a human environment, is potentially dangerous because of its large moving masses, powerful actuators and unpredictably complex behavior. A robot falling on someone or just stepping on his foot by mistake could cause much more damage to the victim than a human being of the same size. Designing and programming robots to be intrinsically safe and to exhibit safe behavior in a human environment is one of the great challenges in robotics. Some theorists, such as Eliezer Yudkowsky, have suggested that developing a robot with a powerful conscience may be the most prudent course of action in this regard.
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