A Brief Intro About Robotics

By Author: fed pats
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The Chrysler corporation completely gutted its Windsor, Ontario, car assembly plant and within six weeks had installed an entirely new factory inside the building. It was a marvel of engineering. When it came time to go to work, a whole new work force marched onto the assembly line. There on opening day was a crew of 150 industrial robots. Industrial robots don't look anything like the androids from sci-fi books and movies. They don't act like the evil Daleks or a fusspot C-3P0. If anything, the industrial robots toiling on the Chrysler line resemble elegant swans or baby brontosauruses with their fat, squat bodies, long arched necks and small heads. An industrial robot is essentially a long manipulator arm that holds tools such as welding guns or motorized screwdrivers or grippers for picking up objects. The robots working at Chrysler and in numerous other modern factories are extremely adept at performing highly specialized tasks - one robot may spray paint car parts while another does spots welds while another pours radioactive chemicals. Robots are ideal workers: they never get bored and they work around the clock. What's ...
... even more important, they're flexible. By altering its programming you can instruct a robot to take on different tasks. This is largely what sets robots apart from other machines; try as you might you can't make your washing machine do the dishes. Although some critics complain that robots are stealing much- needed jobs away from people, so far they've been given only the dreariest, dirtiest, most soul- destroying work. The word robot is Slav in origin and is related to the words for work and worker. Robots first appeared in a play, Rossum's Universal Robots, written in 1920 by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek. The play tells of an engineer who designs man-like machines that have no human weakness and become immensely popular. However, when the robots are used for war they rebel against their human masters. Though industrial robots do dull, dehumanizing work, they are nevertheless a delight to watch as they crane their long necks, swivel their heads and poke about the area where they work. They satisfy "that vague longing to see the human body reflected in a machine, to see a living function translated into mechanical parts", as one writer has said. One of the earliest attempts at a robot design was a machine, nicknamed Shakey by its inventor because it was so wobbly on its feet. Today, poor Shakey is a rusting pile of metal sitting in the corner of a California laboratory. Robot engineers have since realized that the greater challenge is not in putting together the Human consciousness is a stream in which ideas bubble up from the bottom or jump into the air like fish. This debate over intelligence and mind is, of course, one that has gone on for thousands of years. Perhaps the outcome of the "robolution" will be to make us that much wiser.

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