Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at what the word robot means, and the facts and fiction associated with robots. We have defined what a real robot is. You have seen what a machine needs to do in order to be considered a robot.

We've investigated the robots seen in the home and in industry. You've been shown some designed to amaze or travel to other planets. We've also looked at hobbyist and education robots, and how some of these are just built for fun. You've seen some block diagrams of real-world devices that may not have been considered robots. You've also spotted how our homes may already have several robots present.

I hope this chapter has you thinking about what earns the title of robot. A washing machine can be fully automatic, starting at some time later, following a program, with some advanced machines saving water by detecting the quality of the water coming out from the clothes as a metric for how clean they are. A machine called a robot, however, could be simply a remote-controlled device, such as telepresence robots or Robot Wars robots. Undoubtedly, all have sophisticated engineering, requiring many similar skills to make them.

While some robots are clearly robots, such as the Honda ASIMO and Baxter, some others are far harder to draw the line at. If the broad concept of a decision-making, electro-mechanical machine fits these cases, it would exclude the remote-controlled type. If the concept of machines that are mobile is applied, then a toy RC car would be included, while a fully autonomous smart machine that is stationary is excluded. A machine could be made to look robot-like with anthropic (human-like) characteristics, but simply being mechanical, moving an arm up and down – is this a robot? It isn't running a program or reacting to an environment.

Now that we have explored what robots are, let's move on to the next chapter, in which we'll look at how to plan a robot so we can build it.