Robot software

Robot software is the coded commands that tell a mechanical device (known as a robot) what tasks to perform and control its actions. Robot software is used to perform tasks and automate tasks to be performed. Programming robots is a non-trivial task. Many software systems and frameworks have been proposed to make programming robots easier.

Some robot software aims at developing intelligent mechanical devices. Though common in science fiction stories, such programs are yet to become common-place in reality and much development is yet required in the field of artificial intelligence before they even begin to approach the science fiction possibilities. Pre-programmed hardware may include feedback loops such that it can interact with its environment, but does not display actual intelligence.

Introduction

Robot Software consists of the instructions that control a robot's actions and provide information regarding required tasks. When a program is written using this software, the robot is able to execute commands and perform tasks. Programming robots can be a complex and challenging process, and while it has become easier over the years, the lack of cross-platform industry standards has affected the development of software tools for robots compared to other automated control systems such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs).

Dataflow programming techniques are used by most robot manufacturers, and is based on the concept that when the value of a variable changes, the values of other variables affected should also change. A programming language that incorporates dataflow principles is called adataflow language. In addition to numeric processing, dataflow languages also incorporate functional concepts. Unlike other programming languages which use imperative programming, dataflow programming is modeled as a sequence of functions.

With any programming software, the state of a program at any given time is an important consideration. The state provides an indication of the various conditions at a particular instant. In order to function properly, most programming languages require a significant amount of state information. This information is invisible to the programmer.

Another key concept – which is associated with any type of robot programming, is the concept of runtime. When a program is running, or executing, it is said to be in runtime. The term runtime is also used as a short form when referring to a runtime library, which is a library of code instructions used by a computer language to manage a program written in the language. The term is also used by software developers to specify when errors in a program can occur. A runtime error is an error that happens while the program is executing. For example, if a robot arm was programmed to turn left, and it turned right, then that would be a runtime error.

The software architecture of a system consists of the various software components used to design and operate the software. All programming methods rely on software architecture as a method of organizing a software system since it not only provides communication support but is also a critical component in hardware and software interfaces.

Talking robots and AI

Martin Hägele - The European Robotics Market

Martin Hägele, who is the head of the Robot Systems Department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart, Germany. He presents the current landscape and trends in the European robotics market.

In 1993, inspired by the book Robots in Service, he led a study on the market potentials and challenges of service robots. He was the project lead and supervisor of numerous service robot developments including a fuel-refilling robot resulting in a fully operational gas station and several generations of mobile robots developed for museums, shopping centers and home applications (Care-o-bot). Hägele coordinated numerous publicly-funded research projects to develop robot technologies for industrial and service applications. He is currently leader of a large-scale European initiative for the creation of a new family of Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME)-suitable robots. He is also active in the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), in the European Robotics Network (EURON), and the European Robotics Platform (EUROP).

For more facts and figures, check out the the annual yearbook/statistical framework on industrial and service robots, the WORLD ROBOTICS 2006:

• - Total world-wide sales of industrial robots in 2005: 126,700 units, up 30% on 2004; in Europe: ~30.000 (down 2% on 2004)
• - World total stock of operational industrial robots: 923,000 units, 9% greater than 2004; in Europe: ~300.000 (7% up from 2004)
• - In Europe some 60% of the robot installations are concentrated on the automotive industry.

Roger Quinn - Insect-like Locomotion

Roger Quinn, who is the director of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab at Case Western Reserve University. Using data from biological organisms such as the Deathhead Cockroach and crickets, he creates robots which efficiently move like insects or serve as models for understanding the dynamics of biological systems.

Starting off with the more complex insect-robot locomotion in the Micro-Crickets,Cockroaches and BILL-Ants he went on to developing more abstract forms of locomotion with the Whegs™ (wheel/leg) series. If you're looking for a robot that can climb up glass, run over difficult terrain, jump or even fly, the Whegs™ robot series might just be what you need.

Daniel Wilson - How to Survive a Robot Uprising

Daniel Wilson about his Rave Award winning book on "How to Survive A Robot Uprising". With his humor in pocket, Daniel walks us through the worst Sci-Fi and Hollywood robot attacks. Luckily, his PhD in robotics and army of CMU colleagues are full of resources when it comes to detecting the weak points of their robot protégés.
He is also the author of "Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived" and is currently working on the sequel to Robot Uprising, titled "How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, and Zombies."

Daniel Wilson has also worked in top research laboratories, including Microsoft Research, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and Intel Research Seattle.

David Hanson - Human-like Social Robots

David Hanson about Human-like social robots. If you fancy a tea with Einstein or a Sci Fi discussion with Philip K. Dick, he might be able to provide you with some interesting look-alikes. Using his patented Frubber™ skin like material and artistic background he has been sculpting robots which look like humans and interact with them through speech, facial expressions, eye movements and body motions. With his artistic style and vision, he presents his view on the uncanny valley and the ethics of human like robots.

In 2003 David Hanson founded Hanson Robotics in order to pursue the commercialization of socialized robotic characters and their constituent technologies. Hanson robotics′ interests lie in areas of art, robotics, AI, material science, cognitive science, and industry.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi - Embodied Cognition

Yasuo Kuniyoshi about embodied cognition. For the past ten years he has been working on demonstrating that cognition is not dissociable from body-environment interactions. By confronting his human size humanoids to their environment he proves that lifting heavy objects or performing some acrobatic moves become a piece of cake. When augmented with a pinch of chaos theory and a baby size humanoid, Yasou Kuniyoshi attempts to show us that embodied cognition might explain a lot about the way babies move and develop.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi is professor at the University of Tokyo and the head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and Informatics (ISI). His research interests include emergence and development of embodied cognition, human action understanding systems, and humanoid robots. He is the author of over 200 technical publications, editorials and books and is a member of IEEE, Robotics Society of Japan, Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence, Japanese Society of Baby Science, and other societies.

Dario Floreano - Evolutionary Robotics

Dario Floreano about evolutionary robotics. From evolution to learning and from single robots to swarm systems, he presents how evolutionary robotics can be used to understand biological systems and design efficient control for robots.

Dario Floreano is a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland and the head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS). He is well known for his pioneering role in the field of Evolutionary Robotics. He has made significant contributions to the fields of Artificial Neural Systems, Artificial Life, Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Robotics, and Biomimetic Electronics.

His goal is to understand and replicate the principles that allow living and artificial systems to self-organize, adapt, and remain operational in changing and unknown environments using a systemic approach that integrates hardware and software. His current projects include the areas of evolutionary robotics and electronics, bio-mimetic engineering, biology reverse engineering, and computational intelligence (evolutionary systems, neural networks, swarm intelligence).

Rodney Brooks - The Past and Future of Behavior Based Robotics

Rodney Brooks on behavior based robotics. He talks about how mosquitoes in Thailand caused a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence, how to build robots that sell, and how 50 years from now you'll be fighting with your robot for spare parts.

Rodney Brooks is Director of MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Panasonic Professor of Robotics. He is also Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp (nasdaq: IRBT), which is producing the extremely successful Roomba vacuum cleaner robots, the well known PackBot military robots and, most recently, the Verro pool cleaning robots.

Rod Brook's work has been very influential and led to a fundamental shift in research in artificial intelligence. He has argued strongly against symbolic processing approaches to creating intelligent machines and instead stressed the importance of interactions with the physical world. He has published papers and books in many different fields, ranging from computer vision to planetary exploration and compiler design. He has also starred as himself in the Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control", named for one of his scientific papers.

His current projects include work on a number of humanoid robots, including the anthropomorphic Cog and the highly mobile humanoid Coco.

Laurent Keller - Robots and Biology

Laurent Keller on his experience with robots, on the advantages of using robots rather than theoretical models and computer simulations, and on whether we should build artificial animals.

Laurent Keller is a professor of Evolutionary Ecology and head of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a leading expert on the evolution of social insects and has published more than 160 articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics including aging, genomics, kin recognition, sex ratios, cooperation, altruism, and communication. During the last six years he has explored the use of robots as a tool for biological research in a collaboration with the Laboratory of Intelligent systems at the EPFL.

His goal is to understand the principles governing the evolution of animal societies and the ecological and evolutionary consequences of social life. To study these questions he combines the disciplines of animal behavior, ecology, evolutionary genetics and genomics as well as robotics.

Jun Tani - Cognitive Robotics

Jun Tani, who is a team leader at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, about his research in robot cognition and robot consciousness, meta-level cognition, and on his interest in building schizophrenic robots.

Jun Tani has studied robot learning using theoretical models of complex adaptive systems and neural networks for more than 15 years. He has worked for the Sony Computer Science Laband has been a visiting associate professor at the University of Tokyo from 1997 to 2002. Since 2000, Jun Tani has been leading the Laboratory for Behavior and Dynamic Cognition, at the Brain Science Institute, at RIKEN close to Tokyo. He is well known for his research in robot cognition and robot consciousness.

His research interests include phenomenological problems of self-consciousness and embodied cognition. Six years ago, he started neuroscience studies on behavior learning processes in real brains, utilizing both, human brain imaging and animal electrophysiology. His vision is to establish a new research field, brain-inspired robotics, by integrating these approaches.

Auke Ijspeert - Salamander robot swims and walks

Auke Ijspeert on his amphibious salamander robot. He explains how central pattern generators are a powerful tool to link simple high-level commands to complex patterns of locomotion including gait changes, and how they are used in his robot.

Auke Ijspeert is an assistant professor at the EPFL and head of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group (BIRG). He is very well known for his work on central pattern generators and their use in robot control. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. His goal is to study the neural mechanisms underlying movement control and learning in animals and to develop robots capable of agile locomotion in complex environments.

His current research projects span theoretical approaches to sensorimotor coordination, biological modeling of lamprey and salamander locomotion and robotic implementations in robot fish, snakes, salamanders and humanoids.

8 Reasons Why Sending Robots To the Moon Will Be Disastrous

Robots up to no good on the moon. ::via JAXA::

It’s official -- robots will have a base of operations on the moon in which they will have the ability attack all of humankind.  Japan is planning on sending a robot to the moon in 2015 to do scientific research and video recording.  This seems innocent enough, but if everything goes according to plan that same robot will begin building a base on the moon for other robots by 2020.  Giving robots a quiet place to plan their domination of Earth away from the prying eyes of humans is a terrible idea, and here are some reasons why.  Some of them don’t even involve robots.  Thats how serious this could become.

1:  The first robot on the moon will be autonomous.

This is probably what the moon will look like a few years after the robots arrive.

According to Popular Science:

The robots will be controlled from Earth, but they’ll also be imbued with their own kind of machine intelligence, making decisions on their own and operating with a high degree of autonomy.

So while there is supposed to be some level of human control, who knows what those crafty robots will  be able to do while in an autonomous phase of the mission.  They human factor for a mission like this will more than likely be relegated to sending simple commands to the robot such as which direction to move or how to analyze a rock sample.  Ultimately more information will be needed on the amount of autonomy vs. human control the robot will have.  My Spidey-sense tingles when I think about an autonomous robot building a base for other robots.  The robot building this base will be far more advanced that current generation robots, so maybe it will be able to block human control and work completely on its own.  Then what do we do?  Send humans to make it stop?  Launch missiles at the moon?  These options would seem like an act of aggression to this newly “freed” robot, which leads me too…

2:  The robot will already have rockets with it.

Sure these rockets are meant to shoot sample back to Earth, but a robot with rockets is terrifying.

3:   Nuclear materials exist on the moon.

Helium-3, a rare isotope, is believed to exist in relatively large quantities on the moon.  Helium-3 is only 0.0001% of all helium isotopes and only exists on Earth due to being the byproduct of tritium decay.  Helium-3 can be used in nuclear fusion, which is cleaner and more efficient than nuclear fission as used today.  The only problem is that truly efficient fusion via helium-3 could be decades away.  Here is a video explaining some more details of helium-3 fusion reactions and its availability on the moon.
A project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has had a working helium-3 reactor for years.  Using current technology the reaction is very inefficient for power generation, but could a robot use helium-3’s nuclear possibilities for the destruction of Earth when combined with the aforementioned missiles?  We may not know until it is too late, but the existence of helium-3 could cause other problems…

4:   Helium-3 on the moon will create tensions between powerful nations on Earth.

Could access to mining on the moon start a new world war?

Who exactly “owns” the moon?  Since going to the moon had been prohibitively expensive and technologically impairing for most nations until recently, the idea of ownership of the moon has never been a hot button issue.  Should the Japanese robots on the moon discover a way to mine helium-3 in a cost effective matter that will all change.  Besides power generation, helium-3 is used in cryogenics, oil discovery and nuclear weapon detection.  Worldwide supplies of helium-3 are dangerously low, and cost effective alternatives do not yet exist.  Other countries besides Japan are looking towards the moon for helium-3, including Russia, China and India.  The United States originally had plans to build a mining base on the moon, but all moon based missions were scraped.  However, with the many possibilities  for helium-3 the US is probably looking back at moon missions as well -- even if only to mine it.

Since most of the nations interested in mining the moon have plans to build bases on the moon between 2020-2030, how heated will competition for the moon’s resources become and will countries attempt to stake claims to portions of the moon?    There are two United Nations treaties, the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty, which are meant to keep countries from claiming ownership of the moon and to only use the moon for peaceful purposes.  The amount of money involved in setting up moon mining operations will be staggering, but the reward will be tremendous -- therefore following these treaties may not be seen as acting in a country’s best interests.  An article from the Fordham Internation Law Journal explores the possible legal options for helium-3 mining on the moon by the US.

5:  Forget countries, the robots want all that sweet helium-3.

Welcome to the Super-Robot Human Haters Club.

I cannot imagine autonomous robots caring much for meatbag treaties, so how would a colony full of human hating robots that are powered by fusion reactors react to some astronaut telling them to stop hogging all the resources?  I bet that astronaut will not be heading back to Earth, or at least not in one piece.  Add in the fact that robots are being developed specifically for mining the moon and robots will have little need for humans.

So overall the possibilities for conflict over the moon, whether country vs country or man vs machine, seem to be very high.

6:   Other space robots have become smarter over time.

The other robots cheated off this guy in robo-school.

Opportunity, one of NASA’s Mars rovers, received a software upgrade in January that allowed it to make its own decision about whether to further analyze rocks in newly explored areas.  By this time the rover had been working for 7 years and the upgrade was seen as a way to make the rover’s research more efficient and scientifically useful.  Should the future robots on the moon be seen as needing an upgrade, it could make them more autonomous in way not imagined or wanted.  Surely the moon robots of the 2020’s and 2030’s will be far more advanced, and any upgrade pushing it farther out of human control could spell disaster.  A project looking like a great success could suddenly become a massive disaster.

7:  Since there is $$$ to be had, evil corporations will surely be involved.

No robotics other than Darth Vader, but you get the idea.

Think of some high profit industries a second: Energy, banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals, defense, tobacco, Wal-Mart.  Most of the highest profit companies are also the most vilified.  While some of the anger directed towards these companies could be due to jealousy, paranoia and more, many have contributed to their own negative reputations through spreading mistruths and outright lies about the true nature of their business.  Ecological disasters, world spanning economic crises, physically harmful side effects that were hidden, labor abuses and the overall lowering of worldwide living standards have become well known for companies in these areas.

Many of the most vilified sectors of business would inevitably become involved in moon exploration, robotics, and mining.  The energy sector would love to get its hands on helium-3, partly to produce power on the cheap for increased profits, but also to prohibit governments access to relatively cheap sources of energy that could usurp their core business.  The defense sector is currently building a vast array of robots for military and personal use, (your Roomba is made the same company that makes this).  The insurance sector would be drooling at the ability to insure a high risk mission to build a moon base for megabucks.  Hell, Wal-Mart would probably be the first retail store on the moon, even if it is just for robots.

8:  If robots on the moon are successful, it could push humans out of space exploration and science in general.

First the moon, then Earth!

Assuming that these robot endeavors to the moon are a great success, and somehow competing nations and corporations are able to retain peace while not starting a war with the robots in the process, what will that mean for humans in the space program or science in general?  The achievements of these robots could hasten the replacement of humans by robots in future science based projects and beyond.  While it could seem smart to substitute humans with robots in high risk experiments such as moon colonies, it could create a scientific atmosphere that is completely dependent on robotics.  Scientific accomplishments would be skewed towards robots, and robotics could overtake human sciences in the realm of funding and research.

The focus of reaching the moon in the 1960’s hastened advances in science and engineering for the betterment of humankind, but with robots doing all the research future advances could completely ignore humans and instead focus on robots.  While people on Earth would languish in mediocrity and a stagnant, slow research cycle, robotics would explode and advance very quickly at the expense of humanity.  This would inevitably lead to the rise of the machines and the human race becoming enslaved or killed off.

So will robots on the moon equal the end of humanity? Probably.

Robot - Hightech

Origins

Since the beginnings of civilisation man has had a fascination for a human-like creation that would assist him. Societies in the early part of the first millennium engaged in slavery and used those slaves to perform the tasks which were either dirty or menial labours. Having slaves freed the enslavers to carry on their society and concentrate on what they perceived as more important tasks such as business and politics. Man had discovered mechanics and the means of creating complex mechanisms which would perform repetitive functions such as waterwheels and pumps. Technological advances were slow but there were more complex machines, generally limited to a very small number, which performed more grandiose functions such as those invented by Hero of Alexandria.

In the first half of the second millennium man began to develop more complex machines as well as rediscovering the Greek engineering methods. Men such as Leonardo Da Vinci in 1495 through to Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739 have made plans for, and built, automata and robots leading to books of designs such as the Japanese Karakuri zui (Illustrated Machinery) in 1796. As mechanical techniques developed through the Industrial age we find more practical applications such as NikolaTesla in 1898 who designed a radio-controlled torpedo and the Westinghouse Electric Corporation creation Televox in 1926. From here we find a more android development as designers tried to mimic more human-like features including designs such as those of biologist Makoto Nishimura in 1929 and his creation Gakutensoku, which cried and changed its facial expressions, and the more crude Elektro from Westinghouse in 1938.

Electronics now became the driving force of development instead of mechanics with the advent of the first electronic autonomous robotscreated by William Grey Walter in Bristol, England in 1948. The first digital and programmable robot was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called the Unimate. Devol sold the first Unimate to General Motors in 1960 where it was used to lift pieces of hot metal from die casting machines in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey.

Since then we have seen robots finally reach a more true assimilation of all technologies to produce robots such as ASIMO which can walk and move like a human. Robots have replaced slaves in the assistance of performing those repetitive and dangerous tasks which humans prefer not to do or unable to do due to size limitations or even those such as in outer space or at the bottom of the sea where humans could not survive the extreme environments.

Robots come in those two basic forms: Those which are used to make or move things, such as Industrial robots or mobile or servicing robotsand those which are used for research into human-like robots such as ASIMO and TOPIO as well as those into more defined and specific roles such as Nano robots and Swarm robots.

Man has developed a fear of the autonomous robot and how it may react in society, such as Shelley's Frankenstein and the EATR, and yet we still use robots in a wide variety of tasks such as vacuuming floors, mowing lawns, cleaning drains, investigating other planets, building cars, entertainment and in warfare.

Etymology

 

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 play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, but they are closer to the modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of their treatment.

Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.

In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "work", "labor" or "corvée", "serf labor", and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech and many Slavic languages. Traditionally the robota was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. Including Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic rabota "servitude" ("work" in contemporary Bulgarian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Indo-European root  Serfdom was outlawed in 1848 in Bohemia, so at the time Čapek wrote R.U.R., usage of the term robota had broadened to include various types of work, but the obsolete sense of "serfdom" would still have been known.

The word robotics, used to describe this field of study, was coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Asimov also created the "Three Laws of Robotics" which are a recurring theme in his books. These have since been used by many others to define laws used in fact and fiction. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround" the Laws state the following:
 

1.      A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2.      A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

      3.     A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

History

Many ancient mythologies include artificial people, such as the mechanical servants built by the Greek god Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans), the clay golems of Jewish legend and clay giants of Norse legend, and Galatea, the mythical statue of Pygmalion that came to life. In Greek drama, Deus Ex Machina was contrived as a dramatic device that usually involved lowering a deity by wires into the play to solve a seemingly impossible problem.

In the 4th century BC, the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum postulated a mechanical steam-operated bird he called "The Pigeon".Hero of Alexandria (10–70 AD), a Greek mathematician and inventor, created numerous user-configurable automated devices, and described machines powered by air pressure, steam and water. Su Song built a clock tower in China in 1088 featuring mechanical figurines that chimed the hours.

Al-Jazari (1136–1206), a Muslim inventor during the Artuqid dynasty, designed and constructed a number of automated machines, including kitchen appliances, musical automata powered by water, and programmable automata. The robots appeared as four musicians on a boat in a lake, entertaining guests at royal drinking parties. His mechanism had a programmable drum machine with pegs (cams) that bumped into little levers that operated percussion instruments. The drummer could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns by moving the pegs to different locations.

Modern developments

The Japanese craftsman Hisashige Tanaka (1799–1881), known as "Japan's Edison" or "Karakuri Giemon", created an array of extremely complex mechanical toys, some of which served tea, fired arrows drawn from a quiver, and even painted a Japanese kanji character. In 1898 Nikola Tesla publicly demonstrated a radio-controlled torpedo. Based on patents for "teleautomation", Tesla hoped to develop it into a weapon system for the US Navy.

In 1926, Westinghouse Electric Corporation created Televox, the first robot put to useful work. They followed Televox with a number of other simple robots, including one called Rastus, made in the crude image of a black man. In the 1930s, they created a humanoid robot known as Elektro for exhibition purposes, including the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs. In 1928, Japan's first robot, Gakutensoku, was designed and constructed by biologist Makoto Nishimura.

The first electronic autonomous robots were created by William Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, England in 1948 and 1949. They were named Elmer and Elsie. These robots could sense light and contact with external objects, and use these stimuli to navigate.

The first truly modern robot, digitally operated and programmable, was invented by George Devol in 1954 and was ultimately called theUnimate. Devol sold the first Unimate to General Motors in 1960, and it was installed in 1961 in a plant in Trenton, New Jersey to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them.

Commercial and industrial robots are now in widespread use performing jobs more cheaply or with greater accuracy and reliability 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, and mass production of consumer and industrial goods.

Timeline

Date Significance Robot name Inventor 1st century AD and earlier Descriptions of over a hundred machines and automata, including a fire engine, wind organ, coin-operated machine, and steam-powered aeliopile, in Pneumatica and Automata by Heron Ctesibius, Philo,Heron, and others 1206 Early programmable automata Robotband Al-Jazari c. 1495 Designs for a humanoid robot Mechanical knight Leonardo da Vinci 1738 Mechanical duck that was able to eat, flap its wings, and excrete Digesting Duck Jacques de Vaucanson 1800s Japanese mechanical toys that served tea, fired arrows, and painted Karakuritoys Hisashige Tanaka 1921 First fictional automata called "robots" appear in the play R.U.R. Rossum's Universal Robots Karel Čapek 1928 Humanoid robot, based on a suit of armor with electrical actuators, exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Model Engineers Society in London Eric W. H. Richards 1930s Humanoid robot exhibited at the 1939 and 1940 World's Fairs Elektro Westinghouse Electric Corporation 1948 Simple robots exhibiting biological behaviors Elsie and Elmer William Grey Walter 1956 First commercial robot, from the Unimation company founded by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger, based on Devol's patents Unimate George Devol 1961 First installed industrial robot Unimate George Devol 1963 First palletizing robot Palletizer Fuji Yusoki Kogyo 1973 First robot with six electromechanically driven axes Famulus KUKA Robot Group 1975 Programmable universal manipulation arm, a Unimation product PUMA Victor Scheinman

              by  Wikipedia.org