Portal:Robotics
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Culture · Geography · Health · History · Mathematics · Nature · Philosophy · Religion · Society · Technology  Robotics is the science and technology of robots, including their design, manufacture, and application. Robotics requires a working knowledge of electronics, mechanics, and software. A person working in the field is a roboticist. The word robot was introduced by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1920), while the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Runaround" (1941). A robot is an electro-mechanical or bio-mechanical device that can perform autonomous or preprogrammed tasks. Robots may be used to perform tasks that are too dangerous or difficult for humans, such as radioactive waste clean-up, or may be used to automate mindless repetitive tasks that should be performed with more precision by a robot than by a human, such as automobile production.  The word robot is used to refer to a wide range of machines, the common feature of which is that they are all capable of movement and can be used to perform physical tasks. Robots take on many different forms, ranging from humanoid, which mimic the human form and way of moving, to industrial, whose appearance is dictated by the function they are to perform. Robots can be grouped generally as mobile robots (eg. autonomous vehicles), manipulator robots (eg. industrial robots) and self reconfigurable robots, which can conform themselves to the task at hand. Robots may be controlled directly by a human, such as remotely-controlled bomb-disposal robots and robotic arms; or may act according to their own decision making ability, provided by artificial intelligence. However, the majority of robots fall in-between these extremes, being controlled by pre-programmed computers.  QRIO ("Quest for cuRIOsity") was to be a bipedal humanoid entertainment robot marketed and sold by Sony to follow up on the success of its AIBO toy. QRIO stood approximately two feet (0.6m) tall and weighed 16 pounds (7.3 kg). On January 26, 2006, on the same day as it announced its discontinuation of AIBO and other products, Sony announced that it would stop development of QRIO. Before it was cancelled, QRIO was reported to be going through numerous development, testing and scalability phases, with the intent of becoming commercially available within three or four years. QRIO's slogan was "Makes life fun, makes you happy!" QRIO is capable of voice and face recognition, making it able to remember people as well as their likes and dislikes. A video on QRIO's website shows it speaking with several children. QRIO can run at 23 cm/second, and is credited in Guinness World Records (2005 edition) as being the first (and fastest) bipedal robot capable of running (which it defines as moving while both legs are off the ground at the same time). The 4th generation QRIO's internal battery lasts about 1 hour.  Credit: commons:User:Chris 73 Toyota robot at the Toyota Kaikan in Toyota City. Concepts: AI - Automation - Behavior - Calibration - Control - Cybernetics - Human interaction - Kits -Locomotion - Mapping - Mechatronics - Microbotics - Nanorobotics - Neural network - Odometry - Pathfinding - Servomechanism - Software - Vision  Remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) is the common accepted name for tethered underwater robots in the offshore industry. ROVs are unoccupied, highly maneuverable and operated by a person aboard a surface vessel. Most ROVs are equipped with at least a video camera and lights. Additional equipment may include sonars, magnetometers, a still camera, a manipulator or cutting arm, water samplers, and instruments that measure water clarity, light penetration and temperature. The US Navy funded most of the early ROV technology development in the 1960s. This created the capability to perform deep-sea rescue operations and recover objects from the ocean floor. The offshore oil & gas industry created the work class ROVs to assist in the development of offshore oil fields. They are used extensively both in the initial construction of a sub-sea development and the subsequent repair and maintenance. April 20, 2008 CORD Egypt started its registration to the second Robotics competition April 14, 2007 A coalition of high school teams from Connecticut, Massachusetts and Nevada took the top prize at the FIRST Robotics competition, otherwise known as the "Superbowl of Smarts."More... The United States Postal Service is wrapping mailboxes in some 200 cities nationwide in a special covering to look like "Star Wars" robot, R2-D2.More...  NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered more evidence on the Planet Mars(pictured) that water may have flowed beneath the surface and that "cracks" that lead below the surface may have, at one time, been "habitable" for "microbial life." More... A tiny pneumatic hand, with the ability to grasp objects smaller than a millimeter across has been developed by Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin Kim of UCLA's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department. More... [+] Roboticists
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