Page 20 - Introduction to AI Robotics

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Part I
word “robota” which is loosely translated as menial laborer. Robot workers
implied that the artificial creatures were strictly meant to be servants to free
“real” people from any type of labor, but were too lowly to merit respect.
This attitude towards robots has disastrous consequences, and the moral of
the rather socialist story is that work defines a person.
The shift from robots as human-like servants constructed from biological
parts to human-like servants made up of mechanical parts was probably due
to science fiction. Three classic films, Metropolis (1926), TheDay theEarth
Stood Still (1951), and Forbidden Planet (1956), cemented the connotation that
robots were mechanical in origin, ignoring the biological origins in Capek’s
play. Meanwhile, computers were becoming commonplace in industry and
accounting, gaining a perception of being literal minded. Industrial automa-
tion confirmed this suspicion as robot arms were installed which would go
through the motions of assembling parts, even if there were no parts. Even-
tually, the term robot took on nuances of factory automation: mindlessness
and good only for well-defined repetitious types of work. The notion of
anthropomorphic, mechanical, and literal-minded robots complemented the
viewpoint taken in many of the short stories in Isaac Asimov’s perennial fa-
vorite collection, I, Robot. 15 Many (but not all) of these stories involve either
a “robopsychologist,” Dr. Susan Calvin, or two erstwhile trouble shooters,
Powell and Donovan, diagnosing robots who behaved logically but did the
wrong thing.
The shift from human-like mechanical creatures to whatever shape gets
the job done is due to reality. While robots are mechanical, they don’t have to
be anthropomorphic or even animal-like. Consider robot vacuum cleaners;
they look like vacuum cleaners, not janitors. And the HelpMate Robotics,
Inc., robot which delivers hospital meals to patients to permit nurses more
time with patients, looks like a cart, not a nurse.
It should be clear from Fig. I.1 that appearance does not form a useful def-
inition of a robot. Therefore, the definition that will be used in this book
INTELLIGENT ROBOT is an intelligent robot is a mechanical creature which can function autonomously.
“Intelligent” implies that the robot does not do things in a mindless, repeti-
tive way; it is the opposite of the connotation from factory automation. The
“mechanical creature” portion of the definition is an acknowledgment of the
fact that our scientific technology uses mechanical building blocks, not bi-
ological components (although with recent advances in cloning, this may
change). It also emphasizes that a robot is not the same as a computer. A ro-
bot may use a computer as a building block, equivalent to a nervous system
or brain, but the robot is able to interact with its world: move around, change