ExtremeRobots.net

SPOTLIGHT

How Industrial Robots Influence
Commercial Robot Design

What is a robot exactly?

We’ve all read the stories, the ones written in the 1940s about the boxy metallic humanoid robots who should have been doing all of our work twenty years ago and, mysteriously, have yet to appear on the scene. Where are these metal wonders? Why aren’t our factories filled with them?

The answer, of course, is that they are. What writers like Isaac Asimov and others failed to realize is that the most effective, efficient robots would be designed to perform specific tasks – the painting arm in an automobile manufacturing plant, for example, or one of dozens of industrial robots in a meat packing plant.

In fact, one thing we must consider in considering industrial robots is what exactly constitutes a “robot.” What is a robot, really, but an autonomous machine built to perform a function without human control? Industrial robot types like those found in computer manufacturing facilities or auto plants are designed for careful precision work and are programmed to do their work far faster and more effectively than any human could – more effectively, in fact, than a humanoid robot of the type found in old science fiction books ever could either.

What are industrial robots used for?

Industrial robots used for manufacturing applications are certainly the most common type of robot, but there are other types of industrial robots and commercial robots perhaps more familiar to us. One industrial robot type many people may have been made aware of thanks to the recent war is the arms industrial robot – the type of robot designed specifically for use in warfare situations.

The first forms of arms industrial robot were designed for the sort of dangerous, precise work that can be so deadly for human soldiers to attempt – bomb diffusion or mine sweeping, for instance. The Foster-Miller TALON™ system is on the cutting edge of such technology. With a full payload of tools and sensors, the Talon is capable of moving almost anywhere on it’s sturdy tread system and is capable of defusing bombs and searching through rubble that would be dangerous for humans to navigate. It is generally controlled by a remote human operator and was used extensively in the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks.

Arms industrial robots like the Talon are still being used today in Iraq and other areas of conflict around the world. The Talon system has also been updated for modern warfare with the advent of the Swords Talon™ system – the standard Talon robot outfitted with advanced weaponry, allowing the tank like arms industrial robot to conduct advanced urban warfare without ever endangering its human operator. Arms industrial robots like this may very well shape the face of warfare over the next few decades – even now such robots as the Swords Talon are still in the experimental stages.

Robots are used on the home front as well. Robotics corporation Aethon manufactures the popular Tug Robot™, which is used as an automated delivery system in hospitals. Industrial robots used in these kinds of applications carry medical supplies and food throughout large U.S. hospitals and then return to their charging stations to await further instruction. Industrial robots used like this make large institutions like hospitals run much more efficiently and save humans vast amounts of menial labor.

Industrial robot types like those discussed are slowly leading into production in the commercial realm. The Scooba™ and Roomba™ robots, from iRobot, are designed to automatically vacuum homes without requiring human input – making them autonomous, one of the primary characteristics for a device to be considered a robot.

For more information about industrial robots, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_robot

What other fields are robots being developed for?

Commercial robots are being developed for other fields as well. Robots can be bought to mow lawns, for instance, or provide companionship – Sony’s Aibo™, a robotic dog, has sold spectacularly well. Aibo can mimic all of the actions of a real dog, even to the point of learning tricks, walking around and playing with toys. The startling realism which robots like these portray are do to enormous advances in the fields of artificial intelligence in recent years as computer hardware increases exponentially in power and decreases in size. These days, your palm-sized iPod™ can hold literally billions of times more than a microwave-sized device of two decades ago.

In the first years of artificial intelligence, programs were complex decision making algorithms. The program was only capable of doing exactly what was programmed into it – if you typed “Hello,” for example, the computer would respond. If you typed “helo,” though, it wouldn’t know what you were talking about – even though any human would be able to tell what you meant. This is “hard wired” intelligence, and is the most standard kind of programming in today’s robots. Industrial robots, for example, by nature do only one thing and have no need to “learn” or adapt to different situations.

Recently, though, software engineers have been developing more advanced algorithms to simulate and even actualize intelligence. Neural net programming works on the same principle as the human brain and allows for learning, complex decision making, and “fuzzy” logic. A neural net intelligence would learn patterns – if you taught a neural net to respond to “hello”, for example, it would also respond to “helo” because it would recognize the pattern in the same way a human mind would. It is likely that programming like this will decide the future of robotics technology.