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Short History of Robotics

Short History of Robotics. Pre-History of Real-World Robots:. One of the first robots was the clepsydra or water clock , which was made in 250 B.C. It was created by Ctesibius of Alexandria , a Greek physicist and inventor. Hero from Alexandria built robot theater.

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Short History of Robotics

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  1. Short History of Robotics

  2. Pre-History of Real-World Robots: • One of the first robots was the clepsydra or water clock, which was made in 250 B.C. • It was created by Ctesibius of Alexandria, a Greek physicist and inventor. • Hero from Alexandria built robot theater

  3. Jacques de Vaucanson(1709-1782) • Master toy maker who won the heart of Europe. • Flair for inventing the mechanical revealed itself early in life. • He was impressed by the uniform motion of the pendulum of the clock in his parents hall. • Soon he was making his own clock movements.

  4. James Watt

  5. Mechanical horse

  6. Pre-History of Real-World Robots: • The earliest remote control vehicles were built by Nikola Tesla in the 1890's. • Tesla is best known as the inventor of AC power, induction motors, Tesla coils, and other electrical devices.

  7. Robots of the media

  8. Popular culture influenced by these ideas History of Robotics? • RUR • Metropolis(1927) • Forbidden planet(1956) • 2001 A Space Odyssey(1968) • Logans Run(1976) • Aliens(1986)

  9. Robot Continuum Robot continuum ... 1921

  10. Robot Continuum Karl Capek ... 1921 2020

  11. Robot Continuum Robot continuum Karl Capek Dalek ... 1921 2020 2150

  12. Robot Continuum Robot continuum Karl Capek Dalek ... 1921 2020 2150 2421

  13. Robot Continuum Robot continuum Let us step down fantasies….. “Tortoise” ... 1951

  14. History of Real-World Robots: • Other early robots (1940's - 50's) wereGrey Walter’s “Elsie the Tortoise”("Machina speculatrix") and the Johns Hopkins "beast."

  15. What are robots made of? • Sensors: Light Sensors Grey Walter's tortoise, restored recently by Owen Holland and fully operational Grey Walter’s Tortoise

  16. Isaac Asimov and Joe Engleberger • Two fathers of robotics • Engleberger built first robotic arms

  17. History of Real-World Robots: • The first modern industrial robots were probably the “UNIMATES”, created by George Devol and Joe Engelberger in the 1950's and 60's. • Engleberger started the first robotics company, called "Unimation", and has been called the "father of robotics." • Unimates, late 50’s to early 60’s • Automotive Industry • Recent Recovery • Worth over $500 million • 99% are industrial

  18. The Advent of Industrial Robots - Robot Arms • There is a lot of motivation to use robots to perform task which would otherwise be performed by humans: • Safety • Efficiency • Reliability • Worker Redeployment • Cheaper

  19. What are they? • Most of the industrial robots used in factories throughout the world exhibit few of the characteristics that the average person would associate with the term "robot" • Many are simple "pick and place" machines • Lets have a working definition for an industrial robot • These machines are programmable, are automatic and can perform a wide variety of tasks

  20. Robot Manipulators

  21. Pick and Place Machines (robots?) • Simplest kind of industrial robot • Still some on production lines but are being phased out • Perform simple pickup and drop functions • Cannot sense environment • The limits of motion of each joint of the machine are fixed by electric or pneumatic impulse originating at a plug-board control panel

  22. Servo Robots • A more sophisticated level of control can be achieved by adding servomechanisms that can command the position of each joint. • The measured positions are compared with commanded positions, and any differences are corrected by signals sent to the appropriate joint actuators. • This can be quite complicated

  23. What are robots made of? • Effectors: Manipulation Degrees of Freedom

  24. Degrees of Freedom • For the robot arms to become more flexible, more "degrees of freedom" or planes of free movement had to be added. • Many industrial arms have 6 or more planes of motion

  25. Teach and Play-back Robots • Once the math is solved it is a relatively simple matter to teach a robot how to pick something up and what to do with it. • Teaching involves moving the arm through the motions it is expected to perform • During Recall mode the arm repeats, verbatim, what it has been taught

  26. Teach and Play-back Robots

  27. An Arm's Simple World • Life is simpler for a robot arm which can always expect objects to be oriented in the same way. • It only has to worry about its own coordinate system. • The math gets complex but is manageable

  28. The U.S. military contracted the "walking truck" to be built by the General Electric Company for the U.S. Army in 1969. Walking robots

  29. History of Real-World Robots: • The walking truck was the first legged vehicle with a computer-brain, developed by Ralph Moser at General Electric Corp. in the 1960s. • It was a large (3,000 pounds) four legged robot that could walk up to four miles a hour.

  30. The Army and the Artificial Elephant General Electric Walking Truck. • A human controlled the stepping of this robot by pushing pedals with his feet. • The complicated coordination of movements within a leg and between different legs during stepping was controlled by a computer

  31. The Army and the Artificial Elephant • Project failed because of the "unanticipated computational difficulty" of simultaneously controlling all of the degrees of freedom in the four legs. • This failure dramatically demonstrated the sophistication that control systems must have to produce successful walking behavior in legged mechanisms.

  32. Marvin Minsky • MIT Pioneer of AI and Robotics Robotics and AI are very new research areas, most pioneers are alive and well.

  33. Over Confidence • Soon people had faith in their own ability to solve what turned out to be extremely complex control problems

  34. A Robot's More Complex World • It gets more complex when you expect an arm to pick up objects which can be in any orientation. • There are several problems • How do you pick it up? • How do you recognize it is there? • How do you know you are holding it firmly? • How do you have to change your grip to hold it the way you need to? • This is still a subject of much research

  35. Expanding Horizons • Undaunted by previous failures, robotocists continued research in the field • People thought a good strategy would be: • to start from the state-of-the-art as practiced in industrial robotics • and gradually expand the sensory and control capabilities until the more difficult tasks became tractable. • This was the strategy adopted by the robotics group at S.R.I

  36. History of Real-World Robots: • “Shakey" was a small unstable box on wheels that used memory and logical reasoning to solve problems and navigate in its environment. • It was developed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto, California in the 1960s.

  37. Shakey of Nilsson Shakey Nils Nilsson @ Stanford Research Inst. first “general-purpose” mobile platform ... ... 1968

  38. Shakey the robot. Shakey was the first mobile robot that could think independently and interact with its surroundings • Conceived as a demonstration project for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) artificial Intelligence program

  39. Shakey (cont) • Shakey could be given a task such as finding a box of a given size, shape, and color and told to move it to a designated position. • Shakey was able to search for the box in various rooms, cope with obstacles, and plan a suitable course of action. • It was controlled by an off-board PDP-10 computer through a radio link. • It carried : • a TV camera, • an optical range finder, • and touch sensors so that it could know when it bumped into something.

  40. Shakey (cont) Shakey (cont) • While Shakey was a success in some respects it was a great failure as far as autonomy was concerned... • It was controlled by an off-board computer • It could only detect the baseboards of the special rooms it worked in • It could not deal with an unconstrained environment • It was really slow!

  41. Shakey (cont) Shakey Nils Nilsson @ Stanford Research Inst. first “general-purpose” mobile platform Living Room (L) Kitchen (K) sp tv sh tvg Bedroom (B) ... ... 1968

  42. Shakey (cont) Shakey Start START • Go(x,y) • Preconditions: At(sh,x) • Postconditions: At(sh,y) • Push(obj,x,y) • Preconditions: At(sh,x)  At(obj,x) • Postconditions: At(sh,y)  At(obj,y) ACTIONS At(sh,L)  At(sp,K)  At(tvg,B)  At(tv,L) Go(L,B) Push(tv,L,B) Go(L,K) Push(tv,L,K) At(sh,K)  At(sp,K)  At(tvg,B)  At(tv,K) At(sh,L)  At(sp,L)  At(tvg,L)  At(tv,L) GOAL

  43. Stanford Cart Stanford Cart Hans Moravec @ SAIL ACTING “functional” task decomposition SENSING planning perception task execution motor control world modeling ... ... 1976

  44. AI - Historical Perspective • Artificial Intelligence began with very ambitious goals in the 1950s & 60s • Most initial work on AI focused on severely abstracted “toy problems” • Recent work (mid-80s to present) has been very successful in finding applications that are firmly grounded in the real world • Intelligent assistants • Computer vision for navigation, graphics • Robotics systems for manufacturing • Speech analysis & generation • Basic observations: • Artificial Intelligence has specialized into many inter-related but distinct disciplines • Tasks performed effortlessly by humans & animals often are the hardest to emulate

  45. History of AI • 1947~1959 • cybernetics 1947 • Dartmouth 1956 • 1960~1964 • LISP(1960) • GPS(1963) • McCulloch and Pitts (1943) • Neural networks that learn • Minsky (1951) • Built a neural net computer • Darmouth conference (1956): • McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon met, • Logic theorist (LT)- proves a theorem in Principia Mathematica-Russel. • The name “Artficial Intelligence” was coined. • 1952-1969 • GPS- Newell and Simon • Geometry theorem prover - Gelernter (1959) • Samuel Checkers that learns (1952) • McCarthy - Lisp (1958), Advice Taker, Robinson’s resolution • Microworlds: Integration, block-worlds. • 1962- the perceptron convergence (Rosenblatt)

  46. History of AI, continued • EasyFinder • Excite Live • FarCast • (Electronic Commerce) • Mysimon • Amazon • CDNow • eWatch • Careersite • Intelligent Miner • 1966-1974 a dose of reality • Problems with computation • 1969-1979 Knowledge-based systems • Weak vs. strong methods • Prolog(1973) • Expert systems: • Dendral : Inferring molecular structures • Mycin: diagnosing blood infections • Prospector: recomending exploratory drilling (Duda). • Roger Shank: no syntax only semantics • 1980-1988: AI becomes am industry • R1: McDermott, 1982, order configurations of computer systems • 1981: Fifth generation • 1986-present: return to neural networks • Recent event: • Hidden Markov models, planning, belief network

  47. Key Schools of Thought in AI and Robotics now • 1. Symbolic AI • The physical symbol hypothesis(Newell & Simon, 1976) • A physical symbol system has the necessary & sufficient means for general intelligent action • 2. Sub-symbolic AI • Connectionist/neural net approaches • Rely on signals, not symbolsIntelligence emerges from connections between entities in an evolving dynamical system • The physical grounding hypothesis(Brooks, 1990) • Behavior modules of an agent interact with the environment to produce complex behavior without using centralized symbolic models

  48. Rodney A. Brooks • Born in Adelaide, Australia in 1954 • Received Ph.D in computer science from Stanford University • Member of the M.I.T Artificial Intelligence Lab where he leads the mobile robot group. • Well funded to do research in autonomous vehicles. ($$$$)

  49. The early years • Brooks was painfully aware of the failure of robotics to live up to its potential. • Autonomous vehicles were not that autonomous and weren't even very good vehicles. • He identified various aspects of mobile robotics which he considered to be important and obvious

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