You may have noticed (I hope you’ve noticed) that we here at BotJunkie spend a rather significant amount of time writing about robots. It’s sorta funny, then, that we’d be entirely unable to tell you just what exactly a robot is. To be fair, our definition of what constitutes a robot may be on the broad side (infringing on “robot-y”), but I wouldn’t even be able to hazard much of a guess as to the broad side of what. In next month’s issue of Servo Magazine, David Calkins (the guy nominally in charge of RoboGames, among other qualifications) authors a great column entitled, “What the Heck is a Robot, Anyway?” Here are some excerpts:
In 1921, Karl Capek wrote the play Rossum’s Universal Robots, thus coining the term “Robot.” (Okay, technically it was his brother Josef who amended Karl’s original term from either the Latin labori, or the Czech trudnik, but we won’t quibble. It was still Karl’s play.) In the play, they were not electro-mechanical humans. They were very much flesh and blood, manufactured in fleshy parts and later assembled. This very much follows the golum and Frankenstein mythos. And it is clearly the basis for follow-ups like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Blade Runner, BattleStar Galactica, and to an extent, zombie mythos. Ah, but language is ever so fluid, and the original intended Corpus Novum in the above tales has since been replaced by “clone” in modern usage. Yet we grandfather “robot” in on the above stories. Yet under Capek’s original definition, none of us can call our creation a robot. And now, we have so very many different opinions on what a robot is. Ask 10 roboticists for a definition, and you’ll get 15 answers.
More, after the jump.
Everyone likes to call the Mars rover a robot, yet people at JPL drive it. Hell of a lag time on those signals, but bundling packets of driving-coordinate data doesn’t make it autonomous. Many who call the rovers “robots” sneer at combat robots, yet they are fundamentally the same in operation as the Mars rovers. A Roomba is called a robot, but really, it’s mostly just touch sensors doing obstacle avoidance — how much intelligence is that? And why isn’t a dishwasher a robot if a Roomba is? “It has moving parts inside and it’s reprogrammable, but no wheels,” you say. Just like those car-welding robots without wheels that you do call a robot.
If I put a R/C PWM controller on to two servos or ESC controlled motors, and it moves by my joystick motions, many would call it a remote control car (or ROV if they’re being generous). Add a speech recognition chip — shifting from moving the joystick to the left to make the bot go left, to speaking the phrase “go left” — and now those same people will call it a robot. This is not autonomy. Does it really have any intelligence? Sure it has a sensor that listens for key words, but that’s not much difference from a PWM signal being received from a receiver. A 500 Hz voice signal = robot; but a 75 MHz
PWM signal doesn’t?
I think that we, as robot builders, have fallen into the trap that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart did in 1964 when he tried to explain what is obscene, by saying, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced … [b]ut I know it when I see it.” I think that this is where we as robot builders are clearly headed, which is a shame.
There will always be a few people who get snobby about what’s what, even to the point of University vs. Garage Builders classifying as to who’s in and who’s out. But in the end, the line isn’t a line, it’s a long gradient of gray, slowly shifting from white to black, but heavily in the gray zone.
You can read the full article (among lots of other equally interesting articles) in the June issue of Servo Magazine, which according to experts (experts, I tell you!) is “the premier robot mag” and “everyone who likes bots should subscribe.” A mere $20 gets you an online access for a year.
And if you feel the need to wax philosophical about robots, RoboGames (coming up next month) would be a perfect place to do it.
Excerpts reprinted by permission from T&L Publications, Inc.