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Bots / The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 1

2 The Ultimate Palm Robot

T here’s nothing quite like robotics. Sure, there are all sorts of cool, fun, and
exciting technologies out there, but only robots can so thoroughly ignite
the imagination. Maybe it’s because robots mimic life. Making a robot is
like breathing life into a collection of metal parts and circuit boards. Perhaps we
desperately want mechanized slaves to do our bidding, like Robbie from the
movie Forbidden Planet. Maybe robots have simply been associated with “the
future” sincethe 19th century, and they representourpossible utopian world.
Whatever the reason, people have been tinkering with home-grown robots
for as long as scientists and engineers have been making them in the labora-
tory. In this book, we’ll help you turn a common PDA—your old Palm OS
handheld—into a simple robot. Ready? Before we begin, let’s take a quick
look at the world of robotics.

What Is a Robot, Exactly?

With so many sorts of robots—in movies, working with emergency crews, in
our living rooms, and on drawing boards—you might begin to wonder what,
exactly, the definition of a robot is. After all, it seems that radically different
devices all go by the same name. Do robots have to be autonomous? Can
you build a radio-controlled device and call it a robot? Where do you draw
the line?
For an answer, let’s turn to the dictionary. The American Heritage Dictio-
nary defines a robot this way:

An externally manlike mechanical device capable of performing human tasks
or behaving in a human manner.

Okay, that’ll work, but it’s hardly a complete definition. If we go strictly by
this definition, then in order to be a robot, a device would essentially have to
look or act like a human. We’ve all seen robots that look like cars, planes, bugs,
trash compactors, and dogs. In the 1970s, the Robot Institute of America
established a far more complete definition of a robot:

A robot is a reprogrammable, multifunction manipulator designed to move
material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed
motions for the performance of a variety of tasks.

That definition works a lot better, since it covers almost all of the robots you
commonly (and don’t commonly) see or hear about.

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