“Aimless
extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the
term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid
inefficiency.” -R. Daneel Olivaw
To fire away here’s a video-clip of a much beloved movie.
Transformers - Yes these are Robots,
very advanced Robots.
Robotics, for many of us, this is a
funny term indeed. What comes to our mind if you think of a robot is an awkward
looking creature; one who could do your day to day work, your most boring tasks
or practically everything one can dream of. Is this image true or rather could
it be true? Researchers have tried to answer this question and discussed it
probably more than any other technical topic. Yet, we still haven’t reached our
full expectations of the robotic future.
But what exactly are Robots?
There’s different ways of defining the concept. A
theoretical description for example:
“A robot is a mechanical or virtual agent, usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by a computer program or electronic circuit.”[1] That’s a bit too theoretical, right? Let’s understand the concept of a Robot as a machine which simply reduces our work. So from ‘Can Openers’ to ‘Fans’ to even a ‘Locomotive’, these are all Robots, it’s only the function that varies.
“A robot is a mechanical or virtual agent, usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by a computer program or electronic circuit.”[1] That’s a bit too theoretical, right? Let’s understand the concept of a Robot as a machine which simply reduces our work. So from ‘Can Openers’ to ‘Fans’ to even a ‘Locomotive’, these are all Robots, it’s only the function that varies.
Before we try to understand how the
combination of mechanised parts, a chip and some algorithms are functioning together,
let’s take a closer look at how the Robot is built and the basic nuances that will
constitute that, what we actually call a "Robot".
The Robot is a machine that is
characteristically defined by two major parts - the hardware and the software.
Every business, when constructing a robot, have certain requirements for which
the hardware and the software can be designed for. Let’s look at an example in
this short video.
In this Robowars International video, we see how
robots specifically compete with each other, using their strengths and weaknesses,
to win the title. If we were to project this on the organisational setting the
goal is to destroy competition and to advance. To get a fair example of how this
specific designing works, let’s think of Razer in the video above, and think of
all the possible we could attribute to him or straight to the point which
mechanical instruments would you require to break a slab of Concrete, his
competitor. These instruments would be what we call the hardware. As in this case the Robots are controlled manually, there’s
no specific software related.
So forming the robot hardware profile,
is very simple and consist only of two steps: first we take into account the
requirements, secondly we put all the different hardware parts, which fulfil
the requirements, together on one base. The software part however is a bit more
complicated. Between all of our different hardware parts, there is always a
chip (similar to the ones used in our computers) that connects the hardware
with the software. On this chip we can find the programming that produces the
electric motor signals that drive the robot. This programming is set in several
languages, most of the Low Level, a most basic type of language that is
fundamental to machines. So the robots don’t need a translation, such as they
would need when using a language we
find understandable.
Friends, we welcome you to the
world of Mobile Robotics. We will take you on a journey showing various
examples of Robots in an organisational setting, we will make you realise what
they are doing for us through automation, and teach you that robots can do
things that are practically impossible for the humans to do.
Aishwarya Tiwari
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