Robotics is the engineering science and technology of robots, and their design, manufacture,

and application. Robotics is related to electronics, mechanics, and software. 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!

ASIMO, a humanoid robot manufactured by Honda

A robot is an electro-mechanical or bio-mechanical device that can perform autonomous or
preprogrammed tasks

Robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical

system which, by its appearance or movements, conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its
own. The word robot can refer to both physical robots and virtual software agents, but the latter
are usually referred to as bots. There is no consensus on which machines qualify as robots, but
there is general agreement among experts and the public that robots tend to do some or all of the
following: move around, operate a mechanical limb, sense and manipulate their environment,
and exhibit intelligent behavior, especially behavior which mimics humans or other animals. In
South Africa, robot is an informal and commonly used term for a set of traffic lights.

Stories of artificial helpers and companions and attempts to create them have a long history but
fully autonomous machines only appeared in the 20th century. The first digitally operated and
programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die
casting machine and stack them.

Structure
The structure of a robot is usually mostly mechanical and can be called a kinematic chain (its
functionality being similar to the skeleton of the human 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 a closed parallel kinematical chain. 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 (e.g. biomechanics). 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.

Actuation

A robot leg powered by Air Muscles

Actuators are the "muscles" of a robot, the parts which convert stored energy into movement. By
far the most popular actuators are electric motors, but there are many others, powered by
electricity, chemicals, and compressed air.
 Motors

• The vast majority of robots use electric motors, including brushed and brushless DC
motors.
• Stepper motors: As the name suggests, stepper motors do not spin freely like DC
motors; they rotate in discrete steps, under the command of a controller. This makes them
easier to control, as the controller knows exactly how far they should have rotated,
without having to use a sensor.
• Piezo motors: A recent alternative to DC motors are piezo motors or ultrasonic
motors. The advantages of these motors are nanometer resolution, speed, and available
force for their size.These motors are already available commercially, and being used on
some robots
• Air muscles: The air muscle is a simple yet powerful device for providing a pulling
force. When inflated with compressed air, it contracts by up to 40% of its original
length..For example, the Shadow robot hand uses 40 air muscles to power its 24 joints.
• Electroactive polymers: Electroactive polymers are a class of plastics which
change shape in response to electrical stimulation. They can be designed so that they
bend, stretch, or contract
• Elastic nanotubes: These are a promising, early-stage experimental technology. The
absence of defects in nanotubes enables these filaments to deform elastically by several
percent, with energy storage levels of perhaps 10J per cu cm for metal nanotubes. Human
biceps could be replaced with an 8mm diameter wire of this material. Such compact
"muscle" might allow future robots to outrun and outjump humans
 Human-robot interaction

Kismet can produce a range of facial expressions.

Science fiction authors also typically assume that robots will eventually be capable of
communicating with humans through speech, gestures, and facial expressions, rather
than a command-line interface. Although speech would be the most natural way for the
human to communicate, it is quite unnatural for the robot. It will be quite a while before
robots interact as naturally as the fictional C-3PO.

• Speech recognition: Interpreting the continuous flow of sounds coming from a

human (speech recognition), in real time, is a difficult task for a computer, mostly
because of the great variability of speech. The same word, spoken by the same person
may sound different depending on local acoustics, volume, the previous word, whether or
not the speaker has a cold, etc.. It becomes even harder when the speaker has a different
accent Davis, Biddulph, and Balashek designed the first "voice input system" which
recognized "ten digits spoken by a single user with 100% accuracy" in 1952. Currently,
the best systems can recognize continuous, natural speech, up to 160 words per minute,
with an accuracy of 95%.

• Facial expression:
. A robot should know how to approach a human, judging by their facial expression and
body language. Whether the person is happy, frightened, or crazy-looking affects the type
of interaction expected of the robot. Likewise, robots like Kismet and the more recent
addition.Facial expressions can provide rapid feedback on the progress of a dialog
between two humans, and soon it may be able to do the same for humans and robots.
Frubber robotic faces have been constructed by Hanson Robotics, allowing a great
amount of facial expressions due to the elasticity of the rubber facial coating and
imbedded subsurface motors (servos) to produce the facial expressions. The coating and
servos are built on a metal skull.
 • Artificial emotions
• Artificial emotions can also be imbedded and are composed of a sequence of facial
expressions and/or gestures. As can be seen from the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits
Within, the programming of these artificial emotions is quite complex and requires a
great amount of human observation. To simplify this programming in the movie, presets
were created together with a special software program. This decreased the amount of time
needed to make the film. These presets could possibly be transferred for use in real-life
robots.

NASA robot

Military robots
are autonomous or remote-controlled devices designed for military applications.

A U.S. Marine Corps technician prepares to use a telerobot to detonate a buried improvised
explosive device near Camp Fallujah, Iraq
Such systems are currently being researched by a number of militaries. Already remarkable
success has been achieved with unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator drone, which are
capable of taking surveillance photographs, and even accurately launching missiles at ground
targets, without a pilot. A subclass of these are Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles, which are
designed to carry out strike missions in combat.

Broadly defined, military robots date back to World War II and the Cold War in the form of the
German Goliath tracked mines and the Soviet teletanks. The MQ-1 Predator drone was when
"CIA officers began to see the first practical returns on their decade-old fantasy of using aerial
robots to collect intelligence".[1]

British soldiers with captured German Goliath remote-controlled demolition vehicles (Battle of
Normandy, 1944).
The combat version of the Foster-Miller TALON, SWORDS.

US Mechatronics has produced a working automated sentry gun and is currently developing it
further for commercial and military use.

MIDARS, a four-wheeled robot outfitted with several cameras, radar, and possibly a firearm,
that automatically performs random or preprogrammed patrols around a military base or other
government installation.
 INDUSTRIAL ROBOTS

A Pick and Place robot in a factory

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. 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.\

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 Dirty, dangerous, dull or
inaccessible tasks

There are many jobs which humans would rather leave to robots. The job may be boring,
such as domestic cleaning, or dangerous, such as exploring inside a volcanoOther jobs
are physically inaccessible, such as exploring another planet, cleaning the inside of a long
pipe, or performing laparoscopic surgery

• Telerobots: When a human cannot be present on site to perform a job because it is

dangerous, far away, or inaccessible, teleoperated robots, or telerobots are used. Rather
than following a predetermined sequence of movements, a telerobot is controlled from a
distance by a human operator. The robot may be in another room or another country, or
may be on a very different scale to the operator. For instance, a laparoscopic surgery
robot allows the surgeon to work inside a human patient on a relatively small scale
compared to open surgery, significantly shortening recovery time. When disabling a
bomb, the operator sends a small robot to disable it. Several authors have been using a
device called the Longpen to sign books remotely. Teleoperated robot aircraft, like the
Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, are increasingly being used by the military. These
pilotless drones can search terrain and fire on targets. Hundreds of robots such as iRobot's
Packbot and the Foster-Miller TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the
U.S. military to defuse roadside bombs or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in an
• activity known as explosive ordnance disposal (EOD).
•

•
A robot-manipulated marionette, with complex control systems
 Robotic surgery

Robotic surgery is the use of robots in performing surgery. Three major advances aided by
surgical robots have been remote surgery, minimally invasive surgery and unmanned surgery.
Major advantages of robotic surgery are precision, miniaturization, smaller incisions, decreased
blood loss, less pain, and quicker healing time. Further advantages are articulation beyond
normal manipulation and three-dimensional magnification.

Patient-side cart of the da Vinci surgical system.

The first unmanned robotic surgery took place in May 2006 in Italy.

Applications

• General surgery
• Gastrointestinal surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Radiosurgery

Limitations
Current equipment is expensive to obtain, maintain and operate. If one of the older model non-
autonomous robots is being used, surgeons and staff need special training. Data collection of
procedures and their outcomes remains limited.
 Entertainment ROBOTS

Robots in wrestle A FootBall Player

TOPIO, a robot can play table tennis with human. Walking robots

Two robot snakes Asimo

ASIMO