What was the first practical robot?

A prototype industrial robot arm named Unimate (designed by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger) was sold to General Motors in 1959. It plucked hot automobile parts out of a die-casting machine and quenched them in water.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a revolution in manufacturing as robots replaced humans for many repetitive jobs. However, these robots were not intelligent by today’s standards. Usually they were programmed by humans training their movements, and they had very little decision-making capabilities. There are still many robots like this in factories today, but the trend is towards more intelligent general-purpose robots that can do more than just paint a panel or screw in a bolt.

What can't robots do?

It is very difficult to give a robot the ability to perform a wide variety of tasks, move around in cluttered surroundings, recognise objects in the ‘real world’, understand normal speech, and think for itself. These are exciting areas of current research in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Spoken language understanding involves two primary component technologies : speech recognition (SR), and natural language (NL) understanding.

Although it is easy to put a camera on a robot, it is much more difficult to get the robot to understand what is in an image. Most humans have miraculously good vision. We are able to resolve great ambiguity in scenes. It has proved much more difficult to get robots to understand what is in their universe, and machine vision remains one of the big unsolved problems in robotics research.

There are other problems in robotics that make progress slow. For example, your body is covered with skin, that contains millions of sensors that allow you to do many fantastically precise things. For example, try typing at a computer with gloves on. The lack of touch feedback will make it very difficult. Also your muscles enable you to have very fine control. Even if you are rather clumsy, you are probably much better at manipulating objects than the average robot.

Rapid advances are being made in robotic control systems, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and in the miniaturisation, sophistication and reliability of electronic circuitry, sensors and actuators. These are all contributing to a steady increase in the capabilities of robots. Robots currently under development may become widely used in the food, clothing, nuclear and offshore industries, healthcare, farming, transportation, mining and defence.

development Artificial sophisticated repetitive steadier constrain vision replaced remote capabilities

1. Building robots involves the development of a wide range of skills

2. Nowadays, the word robot is often applied to any device that works automatically or by remote control, especially a machine (automaton) that can be programmed to perform tasks normally done by people.

3. Research has been constrained by a lack of funds.

4. Experimental architecture and design studio Minimaforms has created a zoo for children where rabbits, ponies and pigs, have been replaced with robotic “pets.”

5. Robots are really good at repetitive tasks.

6. 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.

7. Even a surgeon with the steadiest hands can not stay as still as a robotic arm.

8. The biggest change in the past five years is how vision-guided robotic systems are used.

9. Artificial skin is a product which can be used for temporary or permanent replacement of damaged skin.

10. By introducing a more sophisticated control element, the microprocessor, you introduce a significant new tool in solving the robot control problem.

11. Neurosurgeons may one day get help in operating rooms from a robot with movements 10 times steadier than the human hand to perform delicate brain surgeries.

is no clear dividing line between fully autonomous robots and human-controlled machines. For example, the robots that perform space missions on planets like Mars may get instructions from humans on Earth, but since it can take about ten minutes for messages to get back and forth, the robot has to be autonomous during that time.

The term robotics was coined in the 1940s by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. In a series of stories and novels, he imagined a world in which mechanical beings were mankind's devoted helpmates. They were constrained to obey what have become known as Asimov's Laws of Robotics:

The 1960s and 1970s saw a revolution in manufacturing as robots replaced humans for many repetitive jobs. However, these robots were not intelligent by today’s standards. Usually they were programmed by humans training their movements, and they had very little decision-making capabilities. There are still many robots like this in factories today, but the trend is towards more intelligent general-purpose robots that can do more than just paint a panel or screw in a bolt.