Robot world

   

 Robots are programmable physical machines that have sensors and actuators, and are given goals for what they should achieve in the world. Perception algorithms process the sensor inputs, a control program decides how the robot should behave given its goals and current circumstances, and commands are sent to the motors to make the robot act in the world. Some robots are mobile, but others are rooted to a fixed location.

 Robots in plays and movies have generally been much more capable that actual contemporary robots. The first deployed robots were in structured environments such as automobile assembly lines in the 1950’s. At that time, computation and sensors were both very expensive, so the environments for robots were specially constructed so that robots could effectively operate with little sensing or computation. Today’s manufacturing robots still follow this approach and so manufacturing robots are only used in industries where the overhead of building the necessary special environments can be absorbed. This restricts them to factories that produce very expensive objects such as automobiles or silicon wafers, or very high volumes of unchanging products over many years, such as disposable medical devices.