Welcome to the World
Robots are programmable machines designed to do human deeds. Robots usually take on a humanoid form. They are controlled by computers
The word robot was introduced in 1921 during a play called R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which was written by the playwright Karel Copek (pronounced "chop'ek"). Robots have been used in many different movies and books, for example Metropolis is a silent film where a scientist turns a robot into a young woman.
Even though robots are becoming more popular, they’re still tricky to make. Just ask the people at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Scientists there have been trying to invent small robots that would be able to attach to each other and form 3D pictures. They have invented the robots but the problem is trying to get them to connect.
Sometimes people like to get together to show off their robots like on February 12, 2004. Three different schools and organizations gathered in Washington D.C. to show off their new robots. They were Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute for Technology and Delft University. They were showing off three robots they designed.
MIT designed a robot that is named Toddler because of his toddler-like movements. He is the smartest of the bunch. The people who designed him said he learned how to walk in twenty minutes, by learning from experience, just like riding a bike. That’s a smart robot!
Scientists at Cornell designed a large life robot called Denise. Unlike Toddler, Denise relies on her mechanical design to get around. This goes to show how robots can be different.
When robots get damaged, they usually can not function any more because the can't work with the broken piece. This was a big problem until the people at Cornell University and University of Vermont solved it. This was a breakthrough in robotic technology. The scientists at the universities designed a small spider-like robot that has eight motors and two sensors that can tell which way the robot is tilted.
When the robot realizes it’s tilting it searches its large controller database for a new way to function. When it finds the new way the robot is commanded to shift another way to walk without the damaged part. The controller database has 100,000 different ways to shift so it doesn’t use the damaged part. Scientists say the new robot will open lots of new doors. They say it can help scientists in making new robots that can adapt to different environments. This also lead to robots that can keep on going even when they are hurt.
With all this new technology, we could build more and better robots. Like a military robot that's nonstop that'll be used to break into enemy forts or a robotic mailman that could survive the heat and deliver quickly.
We might not have all the cool stuff you see in movies, but we’re getting really close! When it comes to the future of robots a lot of possibilities open up!
*all pictures came from either Microsoft Clipart and http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_images.jsp?cntn_id=104421&org=NSF*