What Can Robots Be Used For?

What Can Robots Be Used For?

Now that a working definition of a robot and artificial intelligence has been
established, an attempt can be made to answer the question: what can intelligent
robots be used for? The short answer is that robots can be used for just
about any application that can be thought of. The long answer is that robots
are well suited for applications where 1) a human is at significant risk (nuclear,
space, military), 2) the economics or menial nature of the application
result in inefficient use of human workers (service industry, agriculture), and
3) for humanitarian uses where there is great risk (demining an area of land
mines, urban search and rescue). Or as the well-worn joke among roboticists
goes, robots are good for THE 3 D’S the 3 D’s: jobs that are dirty, dull, or dangerous.
Historically, the military and industry invested in robotics in order to build
nuclear weapons and power plants; now, the emphasis is on using robots for
environmental remediation and restoration of irradiated and polluted sites.
Many of the same technologies developed for the nuclear industry for processing
radioactive ore is now being adapted for the pharmaceutical indus-

try; processing immune suppressant drugs may expose workers to highly
toxic chemicals.
Another example of a task that poses significant risk to a human is space
exploration. People can be protected in space from the hard vacuum, solar
radiation, etc., but only at great economic expense. Furthermore, space suits
are so bulky that they severely limit an astronaut’s ability to perform simple
tasks, such as unscrewing and removing an electronics panel on a satellite.
Worse yet, having people in space necessitates more people in space. Solar
radiation embrittlement of metals suggests that astronauts building a large
space station would have to spend as much time repairing previously built
portions as adding new components. Even more people would have to be
sent into space, requiring a larger structure. the problem escalates. A study
by Dr. Jon Erickson’s research group at NASA Johnson Space Center argued
that amannedmission toMars was not feasible without robot drones capable
of constantly working outside of the vehicle to repair problems introduced
by deadly solar radiation.51 (Interestingly enough, a team of three robots
which did just this were featured in the 1971 film, Silent Running, aswell as
by a young R2D2 in The Phantom Menace.)
Nuclear physics and space exploration are activities which are often far removed
fromeveryday life, and applications where robots figuremore prominently
in the future than in current times.
The most obvious use of robots is manufacturing, where repetitious activities
in unpleasant surroundings make human workers inefficient or expensive
to retain. For example, robot “arms” have been used for welding
cars on assembly lines. One reason that welding is now largely robotic is
that it is an unpleasant job for a human (hot, sweaty, tedious work) with
a low tolerance for inaccuracy. Other applications for robots share similar
motivation: to automate menial, unpleasant tasks—usually in the service industry.
One such activity is janitorial work, especially maintaining public
rest rooms, which has a high turnover in personnel regardless of payscale.
The janitorial problem is so severe in some areas of the US, that the Postal
Service offered contracts to companies to research and develop robots capable
of autonomously cleaning a bathroom (the bathroom could be designed
to accommodate a robot).

Agriculture is another area where robots have been explored as an economical
alternative to hard to get menial labor. Utah State University has
been working with automated harvesters, using GPS (global positioning satellite
system) to traverse the field while adapting the speed of harvesting
to the rate of food being picked, much like a well-adapted insect. The De-

partment of Mechanical and Material Engineering at the University of Western
Australia developed a robot called Shear Majic capable of shearing a live
sheep. People available for sheep shearing has declined, along with profit
margins, increasing the pressure on the sheep industry to develop economic
alternatives. Possibly the most creative use of robots for agriculture is a mobile
automatic milker developed in the Netherlands and in Italy.68;32 Rather
than have a person attach the milker to a dairy cow, the roboticized milker
arm identifies the teats as the cow walks into her stall, targets them, moves
about to position itself, and finally reaches up and attaches itself.
Finally, one of the most compelling uses of robots is for humanitarian purposes.
Recently, robots have been proposed to help with detecting unexploded
ordinance (land mines) and with urban search and rescue (finding
survivors after a terrorist bombing of a building or an earthquake). Humanitarian
land demining is a challenging task. It is relatively easy to demine an
area with bulldozer, but that destroys the fields and improvements made by
the civilians and hurts the economy. Various types of robots are being tested
in the field, including aerial and ground vehicles.73