It contains an artificial substance. (They are now attaching microchips to cockroaches and other bugs.)
It can sense its environment, and manipulate or interact with things in it.
It has some ability to make choices based on the environment, often using automatic control or a preprogrammed sequence.
It is programmable.
It moves with one or more axes of rotation or translation.
It makes dexterous coordinated movements.
It moves without direct human intervention.
It appears to have intent or agency.
The last property, the appearance of agency, is important when people are considering whether to call a machine a robot, or just a machine.
~ A remotely operated vehicle is sometimes considered a robot (or telerobot).
~ A car with an onboard computer, like Bigtrak, which could drive in a programmable sequence, might be called a robot.
~ A self-controlled car which could sense its environment and make driving decisions based on this information, such as the 1990s driverless cars of Ernst Dickmanns or the entries in the DARPA Grand Challenge, would quite likely be called a robot.
~ A sentient car, like the fictional KITT, which can make decisions, navigate freely and converse fluently with a human, is usually considered a robot.
~ A CNC milling machine is very occasionally characterized as a robot.
~ A factory automation arm is almost always characterized as an industrial robot.
~ An autonomous wheeled or tracked device, such as a self-guided rover or self-guided vehicle, is almost always characterized as a mobile robot or service robot.
~ A zoomorphic mechanical toy, like Roboraptor, is usually characterized as a robot.
~ A mechanical humanoid, like ASIMO, is almost always characterized as a robot, usually as a service robot.
Al- Jazari's programmable humanoid robots
Tea-serving karakuri, with mechanism, 19th century. Tokyo National Science Museum.
Modern developments
The Japanese craftsman Hisashige Tanaka (1799–1881), known as "Japan's Edison", created an array of extremely complex mechanical toys, some of which served tea, fired arrows drawn from a quiver, and even painted a Japanese kanji character. In 1898 Nikola Tesla publicly demonstrated a radio-controlled torpedo. Based on patents for "teleautomation", Tesla hoped to develop it into a weapon system for the US Navy.
In 1926, Westinghouse Electric Corporation created Televox, the first robot put to useful work. They followed Televox with a number of other simple robots, including one called Rastus, made in the crude image of a black man. In the 1930s, they created a humanoid robot known as Elektro for exhibition purposes, including the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs. In 1928, Japan's first robot, Gakutensoku, was designed and constructed by biologist Makoto Nishimura.
The First Unimate
The first electronic autonomous robots were created by William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, England in 1948 and 1949. They were named Elmer and Elsie. These robots could sense light and contact with external objects, and use these stimuli to navigate.
The first truly modern robot, digitally operated and programmable, was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called the Unimate. Devol sold the first Unimate to General Motors in 1960, and it was installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.
Contemporary uses
At present there are 2 main types of robots, based on their use:
~ General-purpose autonomous robots
~ Purpose-build robots.
General-purpose autonomous robots
General-purpose autonomous robots are robots that typically mimic human behavior and are often build to be physically similar to humans as well. This type of robot is therefore also often called a humanoid robot. General-purpose autonomous robots are not as flexible as people, but they often can navigate independently in known spaces. Like computers, general-purpose robots can link with software and accessories that increase their usefulness. They may recognize people or objects, talk, provide companionship, monitor environmental quality, pick up supplies and perform other useful tasks. General-purpose robots may perform a variety of tasks simultaneously or they may take on different roles at different times of day.
Purpose-build robots
In 2006, there were an estimated 3,540,000 service robots in use, and an estimated 950,000 industrial robots. A different estimate counted more than one million robots in operation worldwide in the first half of 2008, with roughly half in Asia, 32% in Europe, 16% in North America, 1% in Australasia and 1% in Africa. Industrial and service robots can be placed into roughly two classifications based on the type of job they do. The first category includes tasks which a robot can do with greater productivity, accuracy, or endurance than humans; the second category consists of dirty, dangerous or dull jobs which humans find undesirable.
For increased productivity, accuracy, and endurance
Many factory jobs are now performed by robots. This has led to cheaper mass-produced goods, including automobiles and electronics. Stationary manipulators used in factories have become the largest market for robots.
Some examples of factory robots:
~ Car production: Over the last three decades automobile factories have become dominated by robots. A typical factory contains hundreds of industrial robots working on fully automated production lines, with one robot for every ten human workers. On an automated production line, a vehicle chassis on a conveyor is welded, glued, painted and finally assembled at a sequence of robot stations.
~ Packaging: Industrial robots are also used extensively for palletizing and packaging of manufactured goods, for example for rapidly taking drink cartons from the end of a conveyor belt and placing them into boxes, or for loading and unloading machining centers.
~ 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. Such robots can place hundreds of thousands of components per hour, far out-performing a human in speed, accuracy, and reliability.
~Automated guided vehicles (AGVs): Mobile robots, following markers or wires in the floor, or using vision or lasers, are used to transport goods around large facilities, such as warehouses, container ports, or hospitals.
Types of robots
~ Soft Robots: Robots with silicone bodies and flexible actuators (air muscles, electroactive polymers, and ferrofluids), controlled using fuzzy logic and neural networks, look and feel different from robots with rigid skeletons, and are capable of different behaviors.
~ Swarm robots: Inspired by colonies of insects such as ants and bees, researchers are modeling the behavior of swarms of thousands of tiny robots which together perform a useful task, such as finding something hidden, cleaning, or spying. Each robot is quite simple, but the emergent behavior of the swarm is more complex. The whole set of robots can be considered as one single distributed system, in the same way an ant colony can be considered a superorganism, exhibiting swarm intelligence. The largest swarms so far created include the iRobot swarm, the SRI/MobileRobots CentiBots project and the Open-source Micro-robotic Project swarm, which are being used to research collective behaviors. Swarms are also more resistant to failure. Whereas one large robot may fail and ruin a mission, a swarm can continue even if several robots fail. This could make them attractive for space exploration missions, where failure can be extremely costly.
~ Haptic interface robots: Robotics also has application in the design of virtual reality interfaces. Specialized robots are in widespread use in the haptic research community. These robots, called "haptic interfaces" allow touch-enabled user interaction with real and virtual environments. Robotic forces allow simulating the mechanical properties of "virtual" objects, which users can experience through their sense of touch. Haptic interfaces are also used in robot-aided rehabilitation.