User talk:Rocketmagnet/RobotScratchOld

Contemporary uses

Robots today have many missions, purposes, and motivations for their creation. They can be placed into roughly two categories based on the type of job they do:

Jobs which a robot can do better than a human. Here, robots can increase productivity, accuracy, and endurance.
Jobs which a human could do better than a robot, but it is desirable to remove the human for some reason. Here, robots free us from dirty, dangerous and dull tasks.

Increased productivity, accuracy, and endurance

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File:Industrial Robotics in car production.jpg

Industrial robots doing vehicle under body assembly

Jobs which require speed, accuracy, reliability, and endurance can be performed far better by a robot than by a human. As as result, many jobs in factories, which were traditionally performed by people, are now robotized. This has lead to cheaper mass-produced goods, including automobiles and electronic goods. 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 800,000 worldwide (42% in Japan, 40% in the EU and 18% in the USA).^[1]

Pick and Place robot, Contact Systems C5 Series^[2]

Some examples of factory robots include:

Car production is now the primary example of factory automation, where, over the last three decades, automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A typical factory contains hundreds of robots working on fully automated production lines (one robot for every ten human workers), assembling, welding and spray painting car bodies. On an automated production line a vehicle chassis is taken along a conveyor to be welded, glued, and painted by a sequence of robot stations.
Packaging: Robots are also used extensively for palletising and packaging of manufactured goods, for example taking drink cartons from the end of a conveyor belt and placing them rapidly into boxes, and loading and unloading of machining centers in factories.
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.^[3] 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.^[4]
Automated Guided Vehicles: Large mobile robots, following markers or wires in the floor, or using vision^[5] or lasers, are used to transport goods around large facilities, such as warehouses, container ports, or hospitals.^[6]

Tasks such as these suit robots perfectly because the tasks can be accurately defined and must be performed the same every time. Very little feedback or intelligence is required, and the robots may need only the most basic of exteroceptors (to sense things in their environment) if any at all.

VersaTrax150 pipe inspection robot reaches Inaccessable places

The Roomba domestic vacuum cleaner robot does a boring job

Dirty, dangerous, dull or inaccessible tasks

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There 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 volcano^[7]. These jobs are known as the "dull, dirty, and dangerous" jobs. Other jobs are physically inaccessable. For example, exploring another planet^[8], 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^[9], 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. Currently, more domestic robots have been sold than any other single type of robot.^[10] 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 true robots.

Telerobots: When a human cannot be present on site to perform a job because it is dangerous, far away, or inaccessable, 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.^[11] 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. This saves the financial cost and physical inconvenience of traveling to book signings around the world.^[12] Such telerobots may be little more advanced than radio controlled cars. Some people do not consider them to be true robots because they show little or no agency of their own.

File:RQ-9 Predator.jpg

The Predator, a teleoperated robot, keeps pilots out of danger

Military robots: Teleoperated robot aircraft, like this Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (right), 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.^[13] Currently, these robots are all teleoperated, but others are being developed which can make decisions automatically; choosing where to fly or selecting and engaging enemy targets.^[14] Hundreds of bomb disposal robots such as the iRobot 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 Ordinance Disposal (EOD).

Elder Care: Many countries, including Japan, contain an aging population, meaning that there are increasing numbers of elderly people to care for but relatively fewer young people to care for them.^[15]^[16]^[17] Humans make the best carers, but where they are unavailable, robots are gradually being introduced.^[18]

Several ways to taxonomise robots

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Latest comment: 17 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Mission, Purpose, Motivation

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Automation: Where robots are better than humans

Dirty, Dangerous, Dull: Where humans would be better, but they just don't want to do it.

Eldercare: Where robots improve the lives of the aged thru direct or indirect aid. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Takeitupalevel (talk • contribs) 00:19, 3 March 2007 (UTC).Reply

Entertainment: Where robots are not necessarally better, but they are good for the novelty value.

Research: Where robots help us learn about ourselves.

Technology

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Sequencers: Where robots perform the same simple operation over and over. Low intelligence.

Teleoperation: Where a robot is remote controlled (realtime programmed)

Telerobot: Where a robot has particial control of itself, but high level control is done by a human

Autonomous: Where a robot performs its task completely by itself, using information from it's exteroceptive sensors.

File:Aibo-zoom.jpg

Entertainment

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Whether they are designed for factory automation, or research, moving robots are fascinating to watch. The sense that an artificial object seems to have a life of its own appeals to humans, who are so used to anthropomorphising. This makes them ideal for entertainment.

History

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The idea of breathing life into inanmate objects 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 Greek 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. Medieval Persian alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, inventor of many basic processes still used in chemistry today, included recipes for creating artificial snakes, scorpions, and humans in his coded Book of Stones. 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 itself was introduced by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which was written in 1920 (See also Robots in literature for details of the play). However, the verb robotovat, meaning "to work" or "to slave", and the noun robota (meaning corvée) used in the Czech and Slovak languages, has been used since the early 10th century. It was suggested that the word robot had been coined by Karel Čapek's brother, painter and writer Josef Čapek.^[19]

Concepts akin to today's robot can be found as long ago as 450 BC when the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum postulated a mechanical bird he called "The Pigeon" which was propelled by steam. Heron of Alexandria (10AD-70AD) made numerous innovations in the field of automata, including (allegedly) one that could speak. Al-Jazari (1136-1206) an Ortoqid (Artuk) Arab 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 (1452-1519) 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).

An early automaton was created 1738 by Jacques de Vaucanson, who created a mechanical duck that was able to eat grain, flap its wings, and excrete.

First robots

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Timeline

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Date	Significance	Robot Name	Inventor
~1495	One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot	mechanical knight	Leonardo da Vinci
1738	Early automaton, a mechanical duck that was able to eat grain, flap its wings, and excrete.	mechanical duck	Jacques de Vaucanson
1898	First teleoperated machine, demonstrated at an exhibition in Madison Square Garden.^[20]^[21]	a boat similar to a modern ROV	Nikola Tesla
1920	Word robot is invented.^[22]		Karel Čapek
1930s	Early humanoid robot. It was exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs	Elektro	Westinghouse
1942	The word robotics is invented for the science fiction story Runaround.^[23]		Isaac Asimov
1948	Simple robots which exhibit biological like behaviours.^[24]	Elsie and Elmer	William Grey Walter
1956	First robot company is founded		George Devol and Joseph Engelberger
1956	First commercial robot. ^[25]	Unimate	George Devol and Joseph Engelberger
1956	Phrase artificial intelligence is coined at a conference in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.^[26]		Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy
1975	Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm	PUMA	Victor Scheinman
1981	First human to be killed by a robot, 37 year-old Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker.^[27]

Is THIS a robot?

External Links

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Videos of SMT pick and place robots

References

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