asimo robot

Regardless of your feelings for the quality of the writing or storyline, you have to admit that the TV program “Knight Rider” has helped to plant the concept of a self-driving car into the public’s consciousness. Now that KITT, the self-driving talking car, has returned to the screen in 2008, and with the successes of robot cars in the DARPA Urban Challenge (see Ken Berry's report in our Spring 2008 issue), autonomous cars seem far more plausible, and indeed, inevitable. As a current baseline of where we are today versus the ideal of KITT’s intelligence, we can compare the smart-aleck Mustang GT500 to a current production Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), the U.S. Army’s MULE, or Multipurpose Logistics Vehicle, which is nearing testing and production. The MULE is being built under contract by Lockheed Martin in Grand Prairie, Texas, a company more famous for building fighter jets.

Any robot sees the world through its sensors. UGVs need to be able to sense a wide variety of objects—cars, the terrain, trees, people, buildings, weaponry—and have a variety of sensors to do this job. They also need to understand where they are and where they are going.

First of all, pretty much every UGV uses some form of the Global Position System (GPS) and has on board some type of mapping system that understands roads and terrain to position the vehicle and to plan ahead for the route it is to take. The operators of the UGV assign it “waypoints,” or spots on the map, that describe the route it is to take. While a robot aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can blindly follow GPS steering instructions, obviously, a ground vehicle cannot.

robot

A robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical system which, by its appearance or movements, conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own. The word robot can refer to both physical robots and virtual software agents, but the latter are usually referred to as bots.[1] There is no consensus on which machines qualify as robots, but there is general agreement among experts and the public that robots tend to do some or all of the following: move around, operate a mechanical limb, sense and manipulate their environment, and exhibit intelligent behavior, especially behavior which mimics humans or other animals.

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, and mass production of consumer and industrial goods.[2]

People have a generally positive perception of the robots they actually encounter. Domestic robots for cleaning and maintenance are increasingly common in and around homes. There is anxiety, however, over the economic impact of automation and the threat of robotic weaponry, anxiety which is not helped by the depiction of many villainous, intelligent, acrobatic robots in popular entertainment. Compared with their fictional counterparts, real robots are still benign, dim-witted and clumsy.