Chapter 9. Exploring Robotics
As the title says, we will be exploring and learning basic concepts of robotics in this chapter. We will begin with a basic introduction to robotics, with some definitions and explanations about robotics systems and a little bit of history about robots. Then, we will look into the robotics system structure, just like we did in Chapter 3, Introduction to Physical Computing Systems, regarding physical computing systems. We will take a look at the basic blocks of hardware and software involved in robotic systems, which is similar to our physical computing systems. Then, we will look into their operation, followed by differential drive robots at the end, because we will be building a differential drive robot in the next chapter.
The contents of the chapter are divided into the following sections:
An introduction to robotics
The elements, structure, and operation of robotics systems
Application areas
Differential-drive robots
Many people remember only the famous actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and relate the humanoid terminator robot from the Terminator movies when they hear the word "robot". Even though it is true that the word robot relates to similar types of robots, people forget that the exact meaning of robots is not just that. Actually, that is just one type of robot: the humanoid type robots or—as people call them these days—androids are robots that resemble humans. We are still at the beginning stages of android robot development—there is a long way to go in that field of research if we are to reach results similar to science fiction movie robots.
What is called a robot has many different definitions. The definitions depend on which technology is being used in the robotic system and what application the robotic system performs. Relating to the known definition of the physical computing system, we can define...
Elements, structure and operation of robotic systems
In this section, you will learn what the robotic systems are composed of, followed by their operation. Like we defined in the previous section, robotic systems are very similar to physical computing systems, just that in some physical computing systems, you might not have actuators that perform tasks that reduce human effort, unlike robotic systems. So, the elements of the systems as well as their operation are almost similar. In some cases, the term "physical computing systems" can be synonymous with robotic systems as well.
Just like any physical computing system, any robotic system will also have input sensors and output actuators connected to a CPU with input/output ports. The actuators are driven based on the computer program running on the CPU, which depends on the inputs from the sensors present in the robotic system.
To make it easy for you to understand as well as to give you a brief idea about the robot we will be building in the...
When we discuss the application areas of robotics, we can see that the existence of robots is widespread. The most commonly categorized robotic systems based on application areas are as follows:
As mentioned before, even though we have been building robots for a long time, their widespread usage came about only through industrial robots in manufacturing to increase productivity. These are machines that perform specific tasks in industries at high speed.
In the preceding picture, you can see robotic arms manufacturing cars in a car manufacturing industry. The programming of these arms is done in such a way that all the robotic arms and conveyers that are moving the cars work in a synchronous way and each of these robot arms perform a specific task, such as fitting a nut or welding two metal sheets.
Robots that help humans with household chores...
Differential-drive robots
Differential-drive is a control mechanism that is being used in most situations requiring control of navigating robots, especially for indoor applications. For beginners as well, this is considered the best control mechanism to get started with robots. Most indoor navigating robots used in industries and homes use this very mechanism.
The concept of this mechanism is to use two separately driven motors coupled with the wheels of the robot, separated by a distance and placed on a fixed common horizontal axis. The base also includes one or multiple caster wheels or roller-ball wheels attached to it to maintain equilibrium.
Here is how it looks:
In the diagram, you can see two different configurations of differential-drive robots. The one on the left has two casters, while the other has just one. These two are one of the most commonly used differential-drive system configurations used. Both of them have different kinematics during navigation. If you want to look into...
With that, we are at the end of this chapter, where we had a basic introduction to robotics, including some examples relating science fiction and reality, followed by a brief explanation of how robotic systems are structured and how they work. We also looked at some examples and discussed application areas. In the end, we also saw how differential-drive robots work and how they can be operated. We will be building our own live-video streaming differential-drive robot in the next chapter.
