Using Robot Kits To Explore The Possibilities Of Technology And Electronics

By Author: protopic uk
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When you speak to most electronics enthusiasts, their love for their subject is clear. Building electronics projects like robot kits is about more than simply making a model and watching it work. It’s about creation – about exploring the boundaries of what is possible, how it’s possible, and what you as an inventor can do to fill the gaps you perceive in the world.

A Robot kits is in many ways the ultimate expression of electric invention. Because the idea behind building a robot is about more even that creating an electronic device to make the life of a human easier. It’s about creating an electronic device that can live like a human. On one level or another, robot kits are about exploring ways to blur the boundary between living organism and machine.

This is because the robot is a machine that exhibits specific behavioural characteristics. This differentiates the robot from – for example – a washing machine, which has no behaviours, only predictably programmed routines.

While a robot may be predictable, in that it can only operate ...
... according to its planned behaviours, it can exhibit adaptive relationships with its surroundings provided those behaviours are programmed carefully and cleverly enough.

For example, some robot kits allow you to build a simple machine that is capable of avoiding objects. The basic difference between this kind of behaviour and the routine of a washing machine is obvious. The robot, with sensors to enable it to identify objects, and a behavioural program telling it to avoid them, is able to perform the same sort of behaviour in any environment containing obstacles – but will exhibit different patterns of movement based on that behavioural ideal.

The washing machine, on the other hand, while it performs a useful function, doesn’t have the ability to artificially sort between different environments and locations and still come up with the same behavioural outcome.

The example above delineates the simplest of robot kits – effectively a machine designed to show how one type of programmed behaviour can make something appear to “decide” things for itself, and act on stimuli external to its own body. This is another important aspect of a robot, which is intended to interact with the world in ways a washing machine never could. The robot perceives and “understands” external stimuli – whereas the only external stimulus a washing machine gets is when a human user presses one of its buttons.

More complex robot kits push the boundaries of artificially learned behaviour further, by allowing the human user to add in more and more programmed elements until the machine functions according to a suite of behavioural rules. A robot programmed both to avoid obstacles and stay away from edges, for example, will be able to navigate a raised surface full of booby traps without coming to harm. While a robot capable of seeking out light sources, or of actively shying away from dark patches, may even be capable of avoiding “predators” in its immediate environs.