Robotics Technology

Robotics is the engineering science and technology of robots, and their design, manufacture, application, and structural disposition. Robotics is related to electronics, mechanics, and software.[1] The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920. The first recorded use of the term was by Isaac Asimov in his 1941 science fiction short-story "Liar!"[2]

History

Stories of artificial helpers and companions likewise attempts to create them have a long history, but fully autonomous machines only appeared in the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Today, commercial and industrial robots are in widespread use performing jobs cheaper or more accurately and reliably than humans. They are also employed for jobs which are too dirty, dangerous, or dull to be suitable for humans. Robots are widely used in manufacturing, assembly, and packing; transport; earth and space exploration; surgery; weaponry; laboratory research; safety; and mass production of consumer and industrial goods.[3]
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. However, in some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942).[8][9] The word robotics was derived from the word robot, which was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.[

Components of robots

Structure

The structure of a robot is usually mostly mechanical and can be called a kinematic chain (its functionality being similar to the skeleton of the human body). The chain is formed of links (its bones), actuators (its muscles), and joints which can allow one or more degrees of freedom. Most contemporary robots use open serial chains in which each link connects the one before to the one after it. These robots are called serial robots and often resemble the human arm. Some robots, such as the Stewart platform, use a closed parallel kinematical chain. Other structures, such as those that mimic the mechanical structure of humans, various animals, and insects, are comparatively rare. However, the development and use of such structures in robots is an active area of research (e.g. biomechanics). Robots used as manipulators have an end effector mounted on the last link. This end effector can be anything from a welding device to a mechanical hand used to manipulate the environment.

Power source

At present; mostly (lead-acid) batteries are used, but potential power sources could be:
pneumatic (compressed gases)
hydraulics (compressed liquids)
flywheel energy storage
organic garbages (through anaerobic digestion)
feces (human, animal); may be interesting in a military context as feces of small combat groups may be reused for the energy requirements of the robot assistant (see DEKA's project Slingshot stirling engine on how the system would operate)
still untested energy sources (eg Joe Cell, ...)
radioactive source (such as with the proposed Ford car of the '50); to those proposed in movies such as Red Planet

Actuation

Actuators are the "muscles" of a robot, the parts which convert stored energy into movement. By far the most popular actuators are electric motors, but there are many others, powered by electricity, chemicals, and compressed air.
Motors: The vast majority of robots use electric motors, including brushed and brushless DC on many robots and CNC machines, as their main can specify how much to turn, for more precise control, rather than a "spin and see where it went" approach.
Piezo motors: A recent alternative to DC motors are piezo motors or ultrasonic motors. These work on a fundamentally different principle, whereby tiny piezoceramic elements, vibrating many thousands of times per second, cause linear or rotary motion. There are different mechanisms of operation; one type uses the vibration of the piezo elements to walk the motor in a circle or a straight line.[11] Another type uses the piezo elements to cause a nut to vibrate and drive a screw. The advantages of these motors are nanometer resolution, speed, and available force for their size.[12] These motors are already available commercially, and being used on some robots.[13][14]
Elastic nanotubes: These are a promising, early-stage experimental technology. The absence of defects in nanotubes[disambiguation needed] enables these filaments to deform elastically by several percent, with energy storage levels of perhaps 10 J/cm3 for metal nanotubes. Human biceps could be replaced with an 8 mm diameter wire of this material. Such compact "muscle" might allow future robots to outrun and outjump humans.[15]

Sensing

Touch

Current robotic and prosthetic hands receive far less tactile information than the human hand. Recent research has developed a tactile sensor array that mimics the mechanical properties and touch receptors of human fingertips.[16],[17] The sensor array is constructed as a rigid core surrounded by conductive fluid contained by an elastomeric skin. Electrodes are mounted on the surface of the rigid core and are connected to an impedance-measuring device within the core. When the artificial skin touches an object the fluid path around the electrodes is deformed, producing impedance changes that map the forces received from the object. The researchers expect that an important function of such artificial fingertips will be adjusting robotic grip on held objects.

Manipulation

Robots which must work in the real world require some way to manipulate objects; pick up, modify, destroy, or otherwise have an effect. Thus the 'hands' of a robot are often referred to as end effectors,[18] while the arm is referred to as a manipulator.[19] Most robot arms have replaceable effectors, each allowing them to perform some small range of tasks. Some have a fixed manipulator which cannot be replaced, while a few have one very general purpose manipulator, for example a humanoid hand.
Mechanical Grippers: One of the most common effectors is the gripper. In its simplest manifestation it consists of just two fingers which can open and close to pick up and let go of a range of small objects. See industrial robot end effectors.
Vacuum Grippers: Pick and place robots for electronic components and for large objects like car windscreens, will often use very simple vacuum grippers. These are very simple astrictive[20] devices, but can hold very large loads provided the prehension surface is smooth enough to ensure suction.
General purpose effectors: Some advanced robots are beginning to use fully humanoid hands, like the Shadow Hand, MANUS,[21] and the Schunk hand.[22] These highly dexterous manipulators, with as many as 20 degrees of freedom and hundreds of tactile sensors.[23]

For the definitive guide to all forms of robot endeffectors, their design, and usage consult the book "Robot Grippers"

Locomotion

Robot locomotion is the study of how to design robot appendages and control mechanisms to allow robots to move fluidly and efficiently. Although wheeled robots are typically quite energy efficient and simple to control, other forms of locomotion may be more appropriate for a number of reasons (e.g. traversing rough terrain, moving and interacting in human environments). Furthermore, studying biped and insect-like robots may impact biomechanics.

A major goal in this field is in developing capabilities for robots to autonomously decide how, when, and where to move. However, coordinating a large number of robot joints for even simple matters, like negotiating stairs, is difficult. Autonomous robot locomotion is a major technological obstacle for many areas of robotics, such as humanoids (like Honda's Asimo).

Environmental interaction and navigation

Though a significant percentage of robots in commission today are either human controlled, or operate in a static environment, there is an increasing interest in robots that can operate autonomously in a dynamic environment. These robots require some combination of navigation hardware and software in order to traverse their environment. In particular unforeseen events (eg. people and other obstacles that are not stationary) can cause problems or collisions. Some highly advanced robots as ASIMO, EveR-1, Meinü robot have particularly good robot navigation hardware and software. Also, self-controlled cars, Ernst Dickmanns' driverless car, and the entries in the DARPA Grand Challenge, are capable of sensing the environment well and subsequently making navigational decisions based on this information. Most of these robots employ a GPS navigation device with waypoints, along with radar, sometimes combined with other sensory data such as LIDAR, video cameras, and inertial guidance systems for better navigation between waypoints

Human-robot interaction

If robots are to work effectively in homes and other non-industrial environments, the way they are instructed to perform their jobs, and especially how they will be told to stop will be of critical importance. The people who interact with them may have little or no training in robotics, and so any interface will need to be extremely intuitive. Science fiction authors also typically assume that robots will eventually be capable of communicating with humans through speech, gestures, and facial expressions, rather than a command-line interface. Although speech would be the most natural way for the human to communicate, it is quite unnatural for the robot. It will be quite a while before robots interact as naturally as the fictional C-3PO.
Speech recognition: Interpreting the continuous flow of sounds coming from a human (speech recognition), in real time, is a difficult task for a computer, mostly because of the great variability of speech. The same word, spoken by the same person may sound different depending on local acoustics, volume, the previous word, whether or not the speaker has a cold, etc.. It becomes even harder when the speaker has a different accent.[55] Nevertheless, great strides have been made in the field since Davis, Biddulph, and Balashek designed the first "voice input system" which recognized "ten digits spoken by a single user with 100% accuracy" in 1952.[56] Currently, the best systems can recognize continuous, natural speech, up to 160 words per minute, with an accuracy of 95%.[57]
Gestures: One can imagine, in the future, explaining to a robot chef how to make a pastry, or asking directions from a robot police officer. On both of these occasions, making hand gestures would aid the verbal descriptions. In the first case, the robot would be recognizing gestures made by the human, and perhaps repeating them for confirmation. In the second case, the robot police officer would gesture to indicate "down the road, then turn right". It is quite likely that gestures will make up a part of the interaction between humans and robots.[58] A great many systems have been developed to recognize human hand gestures.[59]
Facial expression: Facial expressions can provide rapid feedback on the progress of a dialog between two humans, and soon it may be able to do the same for humans and robots. Frubber[clarification needed] robotic faces have been constructed by Hanson Robotics, allowing a great amount of facial expressions due to the elasticity of the rubber facial coating and imbedded subsurface motors (servos) to produce the facial expressions.[60] The coating and servos are built on a metal skull. A robot should know how to approach a human, judging by their facial expression and body language. Whether the person is happy, frightened, or crazy-looking affects the type of interaction expected of the robot. Likewise, robots like Kismet and the more recent addition, Nexi[61] can produce a range of facial expressions, allowing it to have meaningful social exchanges with humans.[62]
Artificial emotions Artificial emotions can also be imbedded and are composed of a sequence of facial expressions and/or gestures. As can be seen from the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the programming of these artificial emotions is quite complex and requires a great amount of human observation. To simplify this programming in the movie, presets were created together with a special software program. This decreased the amount of time needed to make the film. These presets could possibly be transferred for use in real-life robots.
Personality: Many of the robots of science fiction have a personality, something which may or may not be desirable in the commercial robots of the future.[63] Nevertheless, researchers are trying to create robots which appear to have a personality:[64][65] i.e. they use sounds, facial expressions, and body language to try to convey an internal state, which may be joy, sadness, or fear. One commercial example is Pleo, a toy robot dinosaur, which can exhibit several apparent emotions.

Control

The mechanical structure of a robot must be controlled to perform tasks. The control of a robot involves three distinct phases - perception, processing, and action (robotic paradigms). Sensors give information about the environment or the robot itself (e.g. the position of its joints or its end effector). This information is then processed to calculate the appropriate signals to the actuators (motors) which move the mechanical.

The processing phase can range in complexity. At a reactive level, it may translate raw sensor information directly into actuator commands. Sensor fusion may first be used to estimate parameters of interest (e.g. the position of the robot's gripper) from noisy sensor data. An immediate task (such as moving the gripper in a certain direction) is inferred from these estimates. Techniques from control theory convert the task into commands that drive the actuators.

At longer time scales or with more sophisticated tasks, the robot may need to build and reason with a "cognitive" model. Cognitive models try to represent the robot, the world, and how they interact. Pattern recognition and computer vision can be used to track objects. Mapping techniques can be used to build maps of the world. Finally, motion planning and other artificial intelligence techniques may be used to figure out how to act. For example, a planner may figure out how to achieve a task without hitting obstacles, falling over, etc.

Control systems may also have varying levels of autonomy. Direct interaction is used for haptic or tele-operated devices, and the human has nearly complete control over the robot's motion. Operator-assist modes have the operator commanding medium-to-high-level tasks, with the robot automatically figuring out how to achieve them. An autonomous robot may go for extended periods of time without human interaction. Higher levels of autonomy do not necessarily require more complex cognitive capabilities. For example, robots in assembly plants are completely autonomous, but operate in a fixed pattern.

Dynamics and kinematics

The study of motion can be divided into kinematics and dynamics. Direct kinematics refers to the calculation of end effector position, orientation, velocity, and acceleration when the corresponding joint values are known. Inverse kinematics refers to the opposite case in which required joint values are calculated for given end effector values, as done in path planning. Some special aspects of kinematics include handling of redundancy (different possibilities of performing the same movement), collision avoidance, and singularity avoidance. Once all relevant positions, velocities, and accelerations have been calculated using kinematics, methods from the field of dynamics are used to study the effect of forces upon these movements. Direct dynamics refers to the calculation of accelerations in the robot once the applied forces are known. Direct dynamics is used in computer simulations of the robot. Inverse dynamics refers to the calculation of the actuator forces necessary to create a prescribed end effector acceleration. This information can be used to improve the control algorithms of a robot.

In each area mentioned above, researchers strive to develop new concepts and strategies, improve existing ones, and improve the interaction between these areas. To do this, criteria for "optimal" performance and ways to optimize design, structure, and control of robots must be developed and implemented.

Robort Research

Much of the research in robotics focuses not on specific industrial tasks, but on investigations into new types of robots, alternative ways to think about or design robots, and new ways to manufacture them but other investigations, such as MIT's cyberflora project, are almost wholly academic.

A first particular new innovation in robot design is the opensourcing of robot-projects. To describe the level of advancement of a robot, the term "Generation Robots" can be used. This term is coined by Professor Hans Moravec, Principal Research Scientist at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute in describing the near future evolution of robot technology. First, second and third generation robots are First generation robots, Moravec predicted in 1997, should have an intellectual capacity comparable to perhaps a lizard and should become available by 2010. Because the first generation robot would be incapable of learning, however, Moravec predicts that the second generation robot would be an improvement over the first and become available by 2020, with an intelligence maybe comparable to that of a mouse. The third generation robot should have an intelligence comparable to that of a monkey. Though fourth generation robots, robots with human intelligence, professor Moravec predicts, would become possible, he does not predict this happening before around 2040 or 2050.[68]

The second is Evolutionary Robots. This is a methodology that uses evolutionary computation to help design robots, especially the body form, or motion and behavior controllers. In a similar way to natural evolution, a large population of robots is allowed to compete in some way, or their ability to perform a task is measured using a fitness function. Those that perform worst are removed from the population, and replaced by a new set, which have new behaviors based on those of the winners. Over time the population improves, and eventually a satisfactory robot may appear. This happens without any direct programming of the robots by the researchers. Researchers use this method both to create better robots,[69] and to explore the nature of evolution.[70] Because the process often requires many generations of robots to be simulated, this technique may be run entirely or mostly in simulation, then tested on real robots once the evolved algorithms are good enough.[71] Currently, there are about 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is the top country having high density of utilizing robots in its manufacturing industry.[72

Education & Training

Robotics as an undergraduate area of study is fairly common, although few universities offer robotics degrees.

In the United States, only Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) offers a Bachelor of Science in Robotics Engineering. Universities that have graduate degrees focused on robotics include Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, UPENN, UCLA, WPI, and SDSM&T.

In Europe, there is a Master of Science in Vision and Robotics (VIBOT) conducted by Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, Universitat de Girona in Spain and Université de Bourgogne in France, as a part of European Commission's Erasmus Mundus programme. The University of Oslo in Norway has offered a 5-year Master course in Informatics, Robotics & Intelligent Systems for several years[73]. In the UK, Robotics degrees are offered by a number of institutions including the Heriot-Watt University, University of Essex, the University of Liverpool, University of Reading, Sheffield Hallam University, Staffordshire University, University of Sussex, Robert Gordon University, and the University of Wales, Newport.

In Australia, there are Bachelor of Engineering degrees at the universities belonging to the Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS):[74] University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, and the University of Technology, Sydney. Other universities include Deakin University, Flinders University, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Western Australia, and the University of Western Sydney. Others offer degrees in Mechatronics.

In India a post-graduate degree in Mechatronics is offered at Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai. Mechatronics at bachelor level is offered at SASTRA university, Thanjur and kongu college of engineering, Erode.

In Mexico, the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education offers a Bachelor of Science in Digital Systems and Robotics Engineering[75] and a Bachelor of Science in Mechatronics.[76]

In Iran, the Shahrood University of Technology and Hamedan University of Technology offer a Bachelor of Science in Robotics Engineering. Others offer degrees in Mechatronics. Universities that have graduate degrees focused on Mechatronics include Sharif University of Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, University of Tabriz, and Semnan University.

Robots recently became a popular tool in raising interests in computing for middle and high school students. First year computer science courses at several universities were developed which involves the programming of a robot instead of the traditional software engineering based coursework. Examples include Course 6 at MIT and the Institute for Personal Robots in Education at the Georgia Institute of Technology with Bryn Mawr College.

Some specialised robotics jobs require new skills, such as those of robot installer and robot integrator.[77] While universities have long included robotics research in their curricular offerings and tech schools have taught industrial robotic arm control, new college programs in applied mobile robots are under development at universities in both the US and EU, with help from Microsoft, MobileRobots Inc., and other companies encouraging the growth of robotics.