What Are Robots?

What Are Robots?

One of the first questions most people have about robotics is “what is a robot?”
followed immediately by “what can they do?”
In popular culture, the term “robot” generally connotes some anthropomorphic
(human-like) appearance; consider robot “arms” for welding. The
tendency to think about robots as having a human-like appearance may stem
from the origins of the term “robot.” The word “robot” came into the popular
consciousness on January 25, 1921, in Prague with the first performance
of Karel Capek’s play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).37 In R.U.R., an
unseen inventor, Rossum, has created a race of workers made from a vat of
biological parts, smart enough to replace a human in any job (hence “universal”).
Capek described the workers as robots, a term derived from the Czech

word “robota” which is loosely translated as menial laborer. Robot workers
implied that the artificial creatures were strictly meant to be servants to free
“real” people from any type of labor, but were too lowly to merit respect.
This attitude towards robots has disastrous consequences, and the moral of
the rather socialist story is that work defines a person.
The shift from robots as human-like servants constructed from biological
parts to human-like servantsmade up of mechanical parts was probably due
to science fiction. Three classic films, Metropolis (1926), The Day the Earth
Stood Still (1951), and Forbidden Planet (1956), cemented the connotation that
robots were mechanical in origin, ignoring the biological origins in Capek’s
play. Meanwhile, computers were becoming commonplace in industry and
accounting, gaining a perception of being literal minded. Industrial automation
confirmed this suspicion as robot arms were installed which would go
through the motions of assembling parts, even if there were no parts. Eventually,
the term robot took on nuances of factory automation: mindlessness
and good only for well-defined repetitious types of work. The notion of
anthropomorphic, mechanical, and literal-minded robots complemented the
viewpoint taken in many of the short stories in Isaac Asimov’s perennial favorite
collection, I, Robot.15 Many (but not all) of these stories involve either
a “robopsychologist,” Dr. Susan Calvin, or two erstwhile trouble shooters,
Powell and Donovan, diagnosing robots who behaved logically but did the
wrong thing.

The shift from human-like mechanical creatures to whatever shape gets
the job done is due to reality. While robots aremechanical, they don’t have to
be anthropomorphic or even animal-like. Consider robot vacuum cleaners;
they look like vacuum cleaners, not janitors. And the HelpMate Robotics,
Inc., robot which delivers hospital meals to patients to permit nurses more
time with patients, looks like a cart, not a nurse.
It should be clear from Fig. I.1 that appearance does not form a useful definition
of a robot. Therefore, the definition that will be used in this book
is an intelligent robot INTELLIGENT ROBOT is a mechanical creature which can function autonomously.
“Intelligent” implies that the robot does not do things in a mindless, repetitive
way; it is the opposite of the connotation from factory automation. The
“mechanical creature” portion of the definition is an acknowledgment of the
fact that our scientific technology uses mechanical building blocks, not biological
components (although with recent advances in cloning, this may
change). It also emphasizes that a robot is not the same as a computer. A robot
may use a computer as a building block, equivalent to a nervous system
or brain, but the robot is able to interact with its world: move around, change


it, etc. A computer doesn’t move around under its own power. “Function
autonomously” indicates that the robot can operate, self-contained, under
all reasonable conditions without requiring recourse to a human operator.
Autonomy means that a robot can adapt to changes in its environment (the
lights get turned off) or itself (a part breaks) and continue to reach its goal.
Perhaps the best example of an intelligent mechanical creature which can
function autonomously is the Terminator from the 1984 movie of the same
name. Even after losing one camera (eye) and having all external coverings
(skin, flesh) burned off, it continued to pursue its target (Sarah Connor).
Extreme adaptability and autonomy in an extremely scary robot! A more
practical (and real) example is Marvin, the mail cart robot, for the Baltimore
FBI office, described in a Nov. 9, 1996, article in the Denver Post. Marvin is
able to accomplish its goal of stopping and delivering mail while adapting
to people getting in its way at unpredictable times and locations.