3 Summarize the information given in the text about:

1. Advantages of automation

2. Disdvantages of automation

Part II

Texts for supplementary reading

Text1 industrial robotics

1. Use these words to strengthen vocabulary

to sow – сеять

drudgery – изнурительная работа

to coin – создавать, чеканить

akin (to) – сродни (кому-либо, чему-либо); сродный, похожий

allegedly – будто бы, якобы

knight – рыцарь

to cite – вызывать, вызвать

haste – спешка, поспешно

gait – походка

to stack – ставить (стопками), складывать (штабелями), составлять (стопой)

to excrete – выделять

replica – точная копия, дубликат

invasive – нападающий, вторгающийся

to exploit – разрабатывать, эксплуатировать, использовать

biomimicry – подражание, имитирование

drastically – решительно, круто

to inspire – вдохновлять, вселять, распространять

to sustain – поддерживать, выдерживать, подтверждать

aforementioned – вышеупомянутый

mundane – земной, мирской, светский

obstacle – препятствие, помеха

avoidance – избежание, уклонение, аннулирование

velocity – скорость, быстрота

inverse - обратный, противоположный

2 Read the text

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 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 creature 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. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which was written in 1920 (See also Robots in literature for details of the play). However, the noun robota, meaning "labour", "drudgery" used in the Czech and other Slavic 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 patents 613,809, 723,188 and 725,605 for "teleautomation", Tesla hoped to develop the "wireless torpedo" into an automated weapon system for the US Navy. (Cheney 1989) Tesla also proposed but did not build remotely operated war planes and ground vehicles. He also predicted these remote controlled machines were merely precursors of "machines possessed of their own intelligence" (Cheney 1989). See also the PBS website article (with photos) : Tesla - Master of Lightning: Race of Robots

In the 1930s, 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 W. Grey Walter at Bristol University, England in 1948.

The first "modern" robot, digitally operated and teachable, was invented by George Devol and was called the Unimate. It is worth noting that not a single patent was cited against his orignal robotics patent. The first Unimate was personally sold by Devol to General Motors in 1960 and installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die-casting machine and stack them.

The first human to be killed by a robot was 37 year-old Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, in 1981. According to the Economist.com, Urada "climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to

The development of a robot with a natural human or animal gait is incredibly difficult and requires a large amount of computational power. 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. One approach to walk control is Passive dynamics, where the robot's geometry is such that it will almost walk without active control.

Initial work has focused on multi-legged robots, such as hexapods, 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 sensors 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.

Medical robotics is a growing field and regulatory approval has been granted for the use of robots in minimally invasive procedures. Robots are being used 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. More recently, robots can be used autonomously in surgery.

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.

Energetically autonomous robots, is a field of study under the category of biologically inspired robotics, which aims to develop artificial agents that can remain self-sustainable in natural environments with minimum human intervention. This field of research spreads further into the fields of alternative energy sources and waste management, as it integrates the Microbial Fuel Cell technology with robotics, and allows for waste or food waste to be the 'fuel'. This class of robots is at the very early stages of development, however with great impact in applications such as the aforementioned unpleasant or dangerous for humans environments. Two examples of energetically autonomous robots that exist today are EcoBots I and II.

Internet bots, also known as web robots, are automated internet applications controlled by software agents. The word "bot" in the term is a reference to the "robotic", mundane, repetitive tasks that the applications perform. Tactile sensors and artifical skin are close to providing robots with a human-like sense of touch. The South Korean government has set a goal of having a robot in every South Korean home by 2015-2020.Robot news gives current news in robotic developments and Talking Robots Podcast contains interviews with robotics professionals.

Robotics is the science and technology of robots, their design, manufacture, and application. Robotics requires a working knowledge of electronics, mechanics, and software. A person working in the field is a roboticist. The word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Runaround" (1941).

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 a kinematic 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 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. 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.

The mechanical structure of a robot must be controlled to perform tasks. The control of a robot involves three distinct phases - perception, processing and action (robotic paradigms). Sensors give information about the environment or the robot itself (e.g. the position of its joints or its end effector). Using strategies from the field of control theory, this information is processed to calculate the appropriate signals to the actuators (motors) which move the mechanical structure. The control of a robot involves various aspects such as path planning, pattern recognition, obstacle avoidance, etc. More complex and adaptable control strategies can be referred to as artificial intelligence.

Any task involves the motion of the robot. The study of motion can be divided into kinematics and dynamics. Direct kinematics refers to the calculation of end effector position, orientation, velocity and acceleration when the corresponding joint values are known. Inverse kinematics refers to the opposite case in which required joint values are calculated for given end effector values, as done in path planning. Some special aspects of kinematics include handling of redundancy (different possibilities of performing the same movement), collision avoidance and singularity avoidance. Once all relevant positions, velocities and accelerations have been calculated using kinematics, methods from the field of dynamics are used to study the effect of forces upon these movements. Direct dynamics refers to the calculation of accelerations in the robot once the applied forces are known. Direct dynamics is used in computer simulations of the robot. Inverse dynamics refers to the calculation of the actuator forces necessary to create a prescribed end effector acceleration. This information can be used to improve the control algorithms of a robot.

In each area mentioned above, researchers strive to develop new concepts and strategies, improve existing ones and improve the interaction between these areas. To do this, criteria for "optimal" performance and ways to optimize design, structure and control of robots must be developed and implemented.

Industrial robotics is an automation technology that has received considerable attention since about 1960. This section will discuss the development of industrial robotics, the design of the robot manipulator, and the methods of programming robots. The applications of robots are examined below in the section Manufacturing applications of automation and robotics.