What is a robot?

Everyone will have a certain picture in their mind when they hear the word ‘robot’. Perhaps a humanoid metallic device that moves and acts like us, or a huge robotic arm assembling cars incredibly fast and with high precision. But what is a robot?

It turns out that this isn’t a straightforward question. That’s because there isn’t a single universal definition of what a robot is that everyone agrees on. You see, robots can appear in different shapes and forms, to solve all kinds of problems.

The term ‘robotics’

The word robotics was coined by Isaac Asimov in 1942 in his science fiction story ‘Runabout’. He envisioned robots as servants for humans. He also proposed three laws known as the Three Laws of Robotics or Asimov’s Laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws are interesting and relevant to this day. This ethical issue will be considered later in this course.

Earliest robots and the definition of a robot in this course

The earliest robots, as we know them today, were created in the early 1950s by George C. Devol. It was a robot manipulator called Unimate and regarded as the first industrial robot in the world. The world’s first robot manufacturing company was called Unimation, founded by Devol and Engelberger.

For the purpose of this course, a robot is defined with the following general definition: A robot is a programmable machine capable of executing a sequence of actions in the world.

Some examples of robots today that fit to this definition are:

• an autonomous car driving itself in public streets
• a robot manipulator pre-programmed to automatically put doors on a car in a specific controlled environment
• a robot manipulator that can adapt to its environment and pick up objects from a warehouse shelf
• a robot manipulator in a hospital teleoperated by a surgeon to perform precise operations on humans
• a vacuum cleaner capable of automatically cleaning a house
• a flying drone that autonomously navigates around and identifies fires in forests.

The list goes on and on. With such a definition, robots of any shape and form can be built to solve any problem imaginable, with full, partial or no autonomy at all (like telerobotics where a human uses an external control device to teleoperate the robot). What’s important is that a robot is programmed to execute a sequence of actions in the world. If a device doesn’t act in the world, then it’s not a robot.

As we will see, the ‘acting in the world’ is a very challenging problem. This is especially difficult if there is a need to build robots that adjust to any environment (like humans) and not only work within controlled environments (for example, a robot programmed to only work in a certain controlled environment like a manufacturing plant). This type of robot, known as intelligent robots, will be discussed in the video in the next step.