Roobots

ROBOTS
Robotics is the engineering science and technology of robots, and their design, manufacture, application, and structural disposition. Robotics is related to electronics, mechanics, and software.[1] The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in 1920. The first recorded use of the term was by Isaac Asimov in his 1941 science fiction short-story “Liar!”[2]
FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE 80S the group around Rodney Brooks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass. in particular therefore started to intensively explore and experiment with another idea. 1990 and 1991 brought a wide and sometimes quite provocative propagation of their new approach, the core of which can be briefly formulated as follows: ”the world itself is its best representation.” It is necessary to construct autonomous robotic systems so that they are able to make the most effective use of this representation. They only need to construct an internal representation of the real world in cases where we know that it is necessary, and we only need to represent what we know is necessary to represent. The results of the experiments were encouraging and relatively flexibly published in a way understandable for the widest expert circles.                                                                                                            Autonomous robotic systems constructed on the basis of this doctrine mainly work on the principle of reactivity — thanks to the construction of their actuators they directly react to what their sensors tell them about the state of the environment in which they find themselves. From the point of view of their architecture they are very decentralised systems. Each of their relatively independent modules reacts in a certain way in certain situations. The subsumption of modules is carefully set — in the case that two modules might react to the currently sensed state state of the   environment at the same time, it is stated which one ”has priority”, i. e. which one will actually react. Therefore, the basic problem became that of how to secure the most suitable sensorium and the most suitable actuators for autonomous robotic agents for concrete environments, in which they will autonomously follow certain goals, and how to subsume the individual modules from which these decentralised agents are made in the most suitable way. The development of so-called reactive robotics had begun. Scientists said on Thursday they created a brainy, four-legged robot resembling a starfish that can sense damage to its body and, on its own, think up a way to recover. It used this internal model of itself to figure out how to walk on its four legs and eight motorized joints. “In the beginning, the robot starts off and does not know what it looks like. You look at it, and you see that it’s a four-legged machine. But the robot itself doesn’t know that. All it knows is that it could be a snake, it could be a tree, it could have six legs,” Lipson said in an interview. Lipson said the robot used various movements of its joints, first to generate hypotheses and then to formulate an accurate conception of itself. The researchers then tested the robot’s ability to adapt to new situations — in this case injury — by shortening one of its legs. Animals can compensate for injury by changing movements, like limping to favor an injured leg. Machines can be programmed to react to a problem in a certain way.