Page 26 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

CHAPTER 1

Motion Planning—Introduction

Midway along the journey ... I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had
wandered off from the straight path.
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ‘‘Inferno’’

1.1 INTRODUCTION

In a number of Slavic languages the noun “robota” means “work”; its derivative
“robotnik” means a worker. The equivalent of “I go to robota” is a standard morn-
ing sentence in many East European homes. When in 1921 the Czech writer Karel
Capek needed a new noun for his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots),
which featured a machine that could work like a human, though in a some-
what mechanical manner, he needed only to follow Slavic grammar: Chopping
off “a” at the end of “robota” not only produced a new noun with a similar
meaning but moved it from feminine to masculine. It was just what he wanted
for his aggressive machines that eventually rebelled against the humankind and
ran amok. The word robot has stuck far beyond Capek’s wildest expectations—
while, interestingly, still keeping his original narrow meaning.
Among the misconceptions that society attaches to different technologies,
robotics is perhaps the most unlucky one. It is universally believed that a robot
is almost like a human but not quite, with the extent of “not quite” being the pet
project of science fiction writers and philosophers alike. The pictures of real-life
robots in the media, in which they look as close to a human as, say, a refrigerator,
seem to only insult the public’s insistence on how a robot should look.
How much of “not quite”-ness is or ever will be there is the subject of some-
times fierce arguments. It is usually agreed upon that high intelligence is a must
for a robot, as is a somewhat wooden personality. And, of course, the public
refuses to take into account the tender age of the robotics field. One standard
way of expressing the “not quite”-ness is a jerky motion sold as robot motion
in Hollywood movies and by young people imitating a robot on street corners.
Whatever future improvements the public is willing to grant the field, a smooth
motion and a less-than- wooden personality are not among them. A robotics
Sensing, Intelligence, Motion, by Vladimir J. Lumelsky
Copyright  2006 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
1