According to many specialists, our current digital era will be succeeded by a robotic era. With all the technological advances in this field, there is every reason to believe that robots will be soon omnipresent in our lives. They will complete our every tasks, whether at home or at work. Artificial intelligence for assistance applications like Siri or Alexa are already a good start. These are things you may not know yet about those intriguing machines.
Table of Contents
1. The Origin of the Term “Robot”
The first point to be known when you want to learn more about robotic world and advancement is its very origin. In fact, the word “robot” is from Czech language “robota” which means “drudgery”. The first robots appeared in Rossum’s Universal Robots, a 1921 play that ends with the machines dramatically killing all their creators except one. However, we certainly owe the first humanoid robot to Leonardo Da Vinci who drew up plans with a knight in armor able to sit down, to lift his visor and move his arms in 1495.
2. The Robotic Industry Development
The business sector is more developed than most people might think. Today, there are about a million industrial robots used all over the world and half of them are in Japan. Know that Spirit and Opportunity, the real Mars robots, have managed to stay on the Red Planet for more than 3 years. And those droids were supposed to last no more than 3 months. Currently, experts are developing impressive machines that can help humans in their tasks and work. That is notably the case of Kinova Robotics, a robotic company which proposes different assistive solutions with its machines. In 2019, the robotic market will climb to over 135 billion US dollars.
3. The Way How Robots Work
Every robot has an inbuilt computer program and sensors that make it work properly. As a matter of fact, it is the inbuilt program that permits the machine to do know what are the tasks to do, when to do it and how it will go about doing it? On the other hand, the sensors is needed to sense and perceive all the external and internal world. In general, there are two main categories of sensors:
- those that sense the external environment such as light, sound, touch and proximity;
- those that sense the internal state of the robot.
Anyway, the sensors are very close to a human sensory organ and represent the most impressive part of the machine. Without it, a robot cannot perceive its environment, all it can do is then to perform predefined tasks. If you want an example of the use of the sensors in real time, take a look at the Tesla and Waymo self-driving cars.
4. Robots’ Applications
Robots are now used in many fields and mostly perform in assistive tasks to preserve human safety. In education, humanoid robots act like cyber-pets usually used in colleges. They know how to help students to learn in a more effective way. In hospitals, some scientists are already making robots which are similar to doctors. They will be able to deliver drugs at specific locations in the human body.