Robot
A
robot is a machine designed to execute one or more tasks automatically with
speed and precision. There are as many different types of robots as there are
tasks for them to perform.
Robots that resemble humans
are known as androids; however, many robots aren't built on the human
model. Industrial robots, for example, are often designed to perform repetitive
tasks that aren't facilitated by a human-like construction. A robot can be
remotely controlled by a human operator, sometimes from a great distance.
A telechir is a complex robot that is remotely
controlled by a human operator for a telepresence system, which gives that individual the
sense of being on location in a remote, dangerous or alien environment and the
ability to interact with it. Telepresence robots, which simulate the experience and
some of the capabilities of being physically present, can enable remote
business consultations, healthcare, home monitoring and childcare, among
many other possibilities.
An autonomous robot acts as a stand-alone
system, complete with its own computer (called the controller). The most advanced example is the smart
robot, which has a built-in artificial intelligence (AI)
system that can learn from its environment and its experience and build on its
capabilities based on that knowledge.
Swarm robots, sometimes referred to as
insect robots, work in fleets ranging in number from a few to thousands, with
all fleet members under the supervision of a single controller. The term arises
from the similarity of the system to a colony of insects, where the individuals
and behaviors are simple but the fleet as a whole can be sophisticated.
Robots are sometimes grouped according to the
time frame in which they were first widely used. First-generation robots date
from the 1970s and consist of stationary, nonprogrammable, electromechanical
devices without sensors. Second-generation robots were developed in the 1980s
and can contain sensors and programmable controllers. Third-generation robots
were developed between approximately 1990 and the present. These machines can
be stationary or mobile, autonomous or insect type, with sophisticated
programming, speech recognition and/or synthesis, and other advanced features.
Fourth-generation robots are in the research-and-development phase, and include
features such as artificial intelligence, self-replication, self-assembly, and nanoscale size (physical dimensions on the order of
nanometers, or units of 10-9meter).
Some advanced robots are called androids because of their superficial
resemblance to human beings. Androids are mobile, usually moving around on
wheels or a track drive (robots legs are unstable and difficult to engineer).
The android is not necessarily the end point of robot evolution. Some of the
most esoteric and powerful robots do not look or behave anything like humans.
The ultimate in robotic intelligence and sophistication might take on forms yet
to be imagined.
The term comes from a Czech word, robota,
meaning "forced labor." The word robot first appeared in
a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Capek, R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots. In
the play, the robots eventually overthrow their human creators. One
early example of a robotic design dates back to about 1478: Leonardo da Vinci's car, a spring-driven autonomous system
that was likely created to cause a sensation at court.
Robotics
Robotics is a branch of
engineering that involves the conception, design, manufacture, and operation
of robots.
This field overlaps with electronics, computer science, artificial intelligence,
mechatronics, nanotechnology and
bioengineering.
Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov is
often given credit for being the first person to use the term robotics in a
short story composed in the 1940s. In the story, Asimov suggested three
principles to guide the behavior of robots and smart machines. Asimov's Three
Laws of Robotics, as they are called, have survived to the present:
1.
Robots must
never harm human beings.
2.
Robots must
follow instructions from humans without violating rule
3.
Robots must
protect themselves without violating the other rules.
Components of a Robot
Robots are constructed with the following:
Power Supply: The robots are powered by batteries, solar power, hydraulic, or
pneumatic power sources.
Actuators: They convert energy into movement.
Electric motors (AC/DC):
They are required for rotational movement.
Pneumatic Air Muscles: They contract almost 40% when air is sucked in them.
Muscle Wires: They contract by 5% when electric current is passed through them.
Piezo Motors and
Ultrasonic Motors: Best for industrial robots.
Sensors: They provide knowledge of real time information on the task environment.
Robots are equipped with vision sensors to be to compute
the depth in the environment. A tactile sensor imitates the mechanical
properties of touch receptors of human fingertips.
Computer Vision
This is a technology of AI with which the robots can see.
The computer vision plays vital role in the domains of safety, security,
health, access, and entertainment.
Computer
vision automatically extracts, analyzes, and comprehends useful information
from a single image or an array of images. This process involves development of
algorithms to accomplish automatic visual comprehension.
Hardware of Computer
Vision System
This involves:
Power supply
Image acquisition device such as
camera
a processor
a software
A display device for monitoring the
system
Accessories such
as camera stands, cables, and connectors
Cloud robotics
Cloud robotics is
a field of robotics that attempts to invoke cloud
technologies such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centred
on the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics.
When connected to the cloud, robots can benefit from the powerful computation,
storage, and communication resources of modern data center in the cloud, which can process
and share information from various robots or agent (other machines, smart
objects, humans, etc.). Humans can also delegate tasks to robots remotely
through networks.
Cloud computing technologies enable robot systems to be endowed with powerful
capability whilst reducing costs through cloud technologies. Thus, it is
possible to build lightweight, low cost, smarter robots have intelligent
"brain" in the cloud. The "brain" consists of data center, knowledge base,
task planners, deep learning, information processing, environment
models, communication support etc.
Components
A cloud for robots potentially has at least six significant components:
·
Offering a global
library of images, maps, and object data, often with geometry and mechanical
properties, expert system, knowledge base (i.e. semantic web, data centres)
·
Massively-parallel
computation on demand for sample-based statistical modelling and motion
planning, task planning, multi-robot collaboration, scheduling and coordination
of system.
·
Robot sharing of
outcomes, trajectories, and dynamic control policies and robot learning support.
·
Human sharing of
"open-source" code, data, and designs for programming,
experimentation, and hardware construction.
·
On-demand human guidance
and assistance for evaluation, learning, and error recovery
·
Augmented human–robot interaction through
various way.
Research on cloud robotics
RoboEarth was funded by the European
Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development
projects, specifically to explore the field of cloud robotics. The goal of
RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other
robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behavior,
and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.
RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web
style database stores knowledge generated by humans and robots in a
machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include
software components, maps for, task knowledge and object recognition models.
The RoboEarth Cloud Engine includes support for mobile robots, autonomous
vehicles, and drones, which require lots of computation for navigation.
Rapyuta is an open source cloud
robotics framework based on RoboEarth Engine developed by the robotics
researcher at ETHZ. Within the framework, each robot connected to Rapyuta can
have a secured computing environment rectangular giving them the ability to
move their heavy computation into the cloud. In addition, the computing environments
are tightly interconnected with each other and have a high bandwidth connection
to the RoboEarth knowledge repository.
KnowRob is
an extensional project of RoboEarth. It is a knowledge processing system that
combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods with techniques for
acquiring knowledge and for grounding the knowledge in a physical system and
can serve as a common semantic framework for integrating information from
different sources.
RoboBrain is
a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet
resources, computer simulations, and real-life robot trials. It accumulates
everything robotics into a comprehensive and interconnected knowledge base.
Applications include prototyping for robotics research, household robots, and
self-driving cars. The goal is as direct as the project's name—to create a centralized,
always-online brain for robots to tap into. The project is dominated by
Stanford University and Cornel University. And the project is supported by the
National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research
Office, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the
National Robotics Initiative, whose goal is to advance robotics to help make
the United States more competitive in the world economy.
MyRobots is a service for connecting
robots and intelligent devices to the Internet. It can be regarded as a
social network for robots and smart objects With socialising, collaborating and
sharing, robots can benefit from those interactions too by sharing their sensor
information giving insight on their perspective of their current state.
COALAS is
funded by the INTERREG IVA France– England European cross-border co-operation
programmes. The project aims to develop new technologies for handicapped people
through social and technological innovation and through the users' social and
psychological integrity. Objectives is to produce a cognitive ambient assistive
living system with Healthcare cluster in cloud with domestic service robots
like humanoid, intelligent wheelchair which connect with the cloud.
ROS (Robot Operating System) provides
an eco-system to support cloud robotics. ROS is a flexible and distributed
framework for robot software development. It is a collection of tools,
libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex
and robust robot behaviour across a wide variety of robotic platforms. A
library for ROS that is a pure Java implementation, called rosjava, allows
Android applications to be developed for robots. Since Android has a booming
market and billion users, it would be significant in the field of Cloud
Robotics.
C2RO (C2RO Cloud Robotics) is a
platform that processes real-time applications such as collision avoidance and
object recognition in the cloud. Previously, high latency times prevented these
applications from being processed in the cloud thus requiring on-system
computational hardware. C2RO published a peer-reviewed paper at IEEE PIMRC17
showing its platform could make autonomous navigation and other AI services
available on robots- even those with limited computational hardware from the
cloud. C2RO eventually claimed to be the first platform to demonstrate
cloud-based SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) at
RoboBusiness in September 2017.
Limitations of cloud robotics
Though robots can benefit from various advantages of cloud computing, cloud
is not the solution to all of robotics.
·
Controlling a robot’s
motion which relies heavily on sensors and feedback of controller won’t benefit
much from the cloud.
·
Cloud-based applications
can get slow or unavailable due to high-latency responses or network hitch. If
a robot relies too much on the cloud, a fault in the network could leave it
“brainless.”
·
Tasks that involve
real-time execution require on-board processing.
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