Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Robotics

Robotics is the science and technology of robots, and their design, manufacture, and application. Robotics has connections to electronics, mechanics, and software

Origins

Stories of artificial helpers and companions and attempts to create them have a long history, but fully autonomous machines only appeared in the 20th century. The first digitally operated and programmable robot, the Unimate, was installed in 1961 to lift hot pieces of metal from a die casting machine and stack them. Today, commercial and industrial robots are 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, safety, and mass production of consumer and industrial goods.



According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.



Components of robots

Structure

The structure of a robot is usually mostly mechanical and can be called a kinematic chain (its functionality being similar to the skeleton of the human body). The chain is formed of links (its bones), actuators (its muscles), and joints which can allow one or more degrees of freedom. Most contemporary robots use open serial chains in which each link connects the one before to the one after it. These robots are called serial robots and often resemble the human arm. Some robots, such as the Stewart platform, use a closed parallel kinematical chain. Other structures, such as those that mimic the mechanical structure of humans, various animals, and insects, are comparatively rare. However, the development and use of such structures in robots is an active area of research (e.g. biomechanics). Robots used as manipulators have an end effector mounted on the last link. This end effector can be anything from a welding device to a mechanical hand used to manipulate the environment.

Actuation

A robot leg powered by Air Muscles

Actuators are the "muscles" of a robot, the parts which convert stored energy into movement. By far the most popular actuators are electric motors, but there are many others, powered by electricity, chemicals, and compressed air.

  • Motors: The vast majority of robots use electric motors, including brushed and brushless DC motors.
  • Stepper motors: As the name suggests, stepper motors do not spin freely like DC motors; they rotate in discrete steps, under the command of a controller. This makes them easier to control, as the controller knows exactly how far they have rotated, without having to use a sensor. Therefore, they are used on many robots and CNC machines.
  • Piezo motors: A recent alternative to DC motors are piezo motors or ultrasonic motors. These work on a fundamentally different principle, whereby tiny piezoceramic elements, vibrating many thousands of times per second, cause linear or rotary motion. There are different mechanisms of operation; one type uses the vibration of the piezo elements to walk the motor in a circle or a straight line. Another type uses the piezo elements to cause a nut to vibrate and drive a screw. The advantages of these motors are nanometer resolution, speed, and available force for their size.These motors are already available commercially, and being used on some robots.
  • Air muscles: The air muscle is a simple yet powerful device for providing a pulling force. When inflated with compressed air, it contracts by up to 40% of its original length. The key to its behavior is the braiding visible around the outside, which forces the muscle to be either long and thin, or short and fat. Since it behaves in a very similar way to a biological muscle, it can be used to construct robots with a similar muscle/skeleton system to an animal. For example, the Shadow robot hand uses 40 air muscles to power its 24 joints.
  • Electroactive polymers: Electroactive polymers are a class of plastics which change shape in response to electrical stimulation. They can be designed so that they bend, stretch, or contract, but so far there are no EAPs suitable for commercial robots, as they tend to have low efficiency or are not robust. Indeed, all of the entrants in a recent competition to build EAP powered arm wrestling robots, were beaten by a 17 year old girl. However, they are expected to improve in the future, where they may be useful for microrobotic applications.
  • Elastic nanotubes: These are a promising, early-stage experimental technology. The absence of defects in nanotubes enables these filaments to deform elastically by several percent, with energy storage levels of perhaps 10J per cu cm for metal nanotubes. Human biceps could be replaced with an 8mm diameter wire of this material. Such compact "muscle" might allow future robots to outrun and outjump humans.

Rolling robots

Walking robots

iCub robot, designed by the RobotCub Consortium

Walking is a difficult and dynamic problem to solve. Several robots have been made which can walk reliably on two legs, however none have yet been made which are as robust as a human. Typically, these robots can walk well on flat floors, and can occasionally walk up stairs. None can walk over rocky, uneven terrain. Some of the methods which have been tried are:

  • ZMP Technique: The Zero Moment Point (ZMP) is the algorithm used by robots such as Honda's ASIMO. The robot's onboard computer tries to keep the total inertial forces (the combination of earth's gravity and the acceleration and deceleration of walking), exactly opposed by the floor reaction force (the force of the floor pushing back on the robot's foot). In this way, the two forces cancel out, leaving no moment (force causing the robot to rotate and fall over). However, this is not exactly how a human walks, and the difference is quite apparent to human observers, some of whom have pointed out that ASIMO walks as if it needs the lavatory. ASIMO's walking algorithm is not static, and some dynamic balancing is used (See below). However, it still requires a smooth surface to walk on.

Education

Robotics as an undergraduate area of study is fairly common, although few universities offer robotics degrees. In the United States, only Worcester Polytechnic Institute offers a Bachelor of Science in Robotics Engineering. Universities that have graduate degrees focused on robotics include Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, UPENN, and UCLA. In Australia, there are Bachelor of Engineering degrees at the universities belonging to the Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS) [60]: University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, and the University of Technology, Sydney. Other universities include Deakin University, Flinders University, Swinburne University of Technology, and the University of Western Sydney. Others offer degrees in Mechatronics. In India a post-graduate degree in Mechatronics is offered at Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai. In the UK, Robotics degrees are offered by a number of institutions including the Heriot-Watt University, University of Essex, the University of Liverpool, University of Reading, Sheffield Hallam University, Staffordshire University,University of Sussex, Robert Gordon University and the University of Wales, Newport. In Mexico, the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education offers a Bachelor of Science in Digital Systems and Robotics Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Mechatronics.

Robots recently became a popular tool in raising interests in computing for middle and high school students. First year computer science courses at several universities were developed which involves the programming of a robot instead of the traditional software engineering based coursework. Examples include Course 6 at MIT and the Institute for Personal Robots in Education at the Georgia Institute of Technology with Bryn Mawr College.


Robotics portal

Notes

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  43. ^ Swimming snake robot (commentary in Japanese)
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References


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