Contemporary uses of robot
Robots are growing in complexity and
their use in industry is becoming more widespread. The main use of robots has so far been in the
automation of mass production industries,
where the same, definable, tasks must be performed repeatedly in
exactly the
same fashion. Car production is the primary example of the employment of large and complex robots for producing
products. Robots are used in that process for the painting, wedding and
assembly of the cars. Robots are good for such tasks because the tasks can be
accurately defined and must be performed the same every time, with little need
for feedback to control the exact process being performed. Robots can be
manufactured in a wide range of size and so can handle much large tasks than a
human could. Robot are also useful in environments which are unpleasent or
dangerous for human to work in, for example the cleaning of toxic waster, bomb
disposal, work in space or underwater and a mining. Automated Guided Vehicles
(AGVs) are moveable robots that used in large facilities such as warehouses,
hospitals and container ports. For the movement of goods, or event for safety
and security patrols. Such vehicles follow markers or guides to navigate around
the location and can be programmed to move between places to deliver goods or
patrol a certain area. Domestic robots are now available for performing simple
tasks such a vacuum cleaning and grass cutting. By the end of 2004 over
1,000,000 vacuum cleanerrunits had been sold. Example of domestic robots are
sony’s albo and Irobot’s scooba and roomba robots. Humanoid robotsare in
development with the aim of being able to provide robotic functions in a from
that may be more aesthetically pleasing to customers, thereby increasing the
likelyhood of them being accepted in society. These robots fall within a field
knows as social robots which aim to interact and provide companionship to
people.
The
development of a robot with a natural human or animal gail is incredibly
difficult and requires a large amount of computational power. Now that
background technologies of behavior, navigation and path planning have been
solved using basic wheeled robots, roboticists are moving on to develop walking
robots (eg. SIGMO, QRIO, Asimo & Hubo). This field of work is known as
passive dynamics. Initial work has focused on multi-legged robots (eg. Aibo),
such as hexapods, as they are statically stable and so are easier to work with,
whereas a bipedal robot must be able to balance. The balancing problem is taken
to an extreme by the robotic unicycle. A problem with the development of robots
with natural gaits is that human and animal bodies utilise a very large number
of muscles in movement and replicating all of those mechanically is very
difficult and expensive. Progress is being made in the field of feedback and
tactile sensor which allow of robot to sense their actions and adjust their
behaviour accordingly. This is vital to enable robots to perform complex
physical tasks that require some active control in response to the situation.
