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Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Natural sciences · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology  Robotics is the science and technology of robots, including their design, manufacture, and application. Robotics requires a working knowledge of electronics, mechanics, and software. A person working in the field is a roboticist. The word robot was introduced by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1920), while the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Runaround" (1941). A robot is an electro-mechanical or bio-mechanical device that can perform autonomous or preprogrammed tasks. Robots may be used to perform tasks that are too dangerous or difficult for humans, such as radioactive waste clean-up, or may be used to automate mindless repetitive tasks that should be performed with more precision by a robot than by a human, such as automobile production.  The word robot is used to refer to a wide range of machines, the common feature of which is that they are all capable of movement and can be used to perform physical tasks. Robots take on many different forms, ranging from humanoid, which mimic the human form and way of moving, to industrial, whose appearance is dictated by the function they are to perform. Robots can be grouped generally as mobile robots (eg. autonomous vehicles), manipulator robots (eg. industrial robots) and self reconfigurable robots, which can conform themselves to the task at hand. Robots may be controlled directly by a human, such as remotely-controlled bomb-disposal robots and robotic arms; or may act according to their own decision making ability, provided by artificial intelligence. However, the majority of robots fall in between these extremes, being controlled by pre-programmed computers. RoboSapien is a toy-like biomorphic robot designed by Mark Tilden and produced by Wow Wee toys. The RoboSapien is preprogrammed with moves, and also can be controlled by an infrared remote control included with the toy, or by either a personal computer equipped with an infrared transmitter, and an infrared transmitter-equipped PDA. RoboSapien, as the advert for it says, is "The robot that thinks it's a human!". The toy is capable of a walking motion without recourse to wheels within its feet. It is also able to grasp objects with either of its hands, and is also able to throw grasped objects with mild force. It has a small loudspeaker unit, which can broadcast several different vocalizations, all of which appear to be recordings of a human male pretending to be a great ape, such as a gorilla. The toy's remote control unit has a total of 21 different buttons. With the help of two shift buttons, a total of 67 different robot-executable commands are accessible.  Credit: commons:User:Chris 73 Toyota robot at the Toyota Kaikan in Toyota City. Concepts: AI - Automation - Behavior - Calibration - Control - Cybernetics - Human interaction - Kits -Locomotion - Mapping - Mechatronics - Microbotics - Nanorobotics - Neural network - Odometry - Pathfinding - Servomechanism - Software - Vision  Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be defined as the study of methods by which a computer can simulate aspects of human intelligence. One aim of this study is to design a computer that might be able to reason for itself. Another aspect of AI is the ability of the computer to search knowledge in a database for the best possible reply to a question, because this has strong parallels with the way that we solve problems ourselves. AI divides roughly into two schools of thought: Conventional AI and Computational Intelligence.Conventional AI mostly involves methods now classified as machine learning, characterized by formalism and statistical analysis. This is also known as symbolic AI, logical AI, neat AI and Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI). April 20, 2008 CORD Egypt started its registration to the second Robotics competition April 14, 2007 A coalition of high school teams from Connecticut, Massachusetts and Nevada took the top prize at the FIRST Robotics competition, otherwise known as the "Superbowl of Smarts."More... The United States Postal Service is wrapping mailboxes in some 200 cities nationwide in a special covering to look like "Star Wars" robot, R2-D2.More...  NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered more evidence on the Planet Mars(pictured) that water may have flowed beneath the surface and that "cracks" that lead below the surface may have, at one time, been "habitable" for "microbial life." More... A tiny pneumatic hand, with the ability to grasp objects smaller than a millimeter across has been developed by Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin Kim of UCLA's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. More... |
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