LESSON 01 – INTRO TO ROBOTICS

LESSON NOTE

INTRO

The word robot comes from the Czech word, robota, which means “forced work” or “forced labour”. A robot is a machine that is designed to do advanced tasks on its own. Nowadays, most robots are programmable by a computer.

KEY COMPONENTS OF A ROBOT

Here are some key components of a robot:

· Power source – The source of the robot’s electrical energy.

· Controller – The brain of the robot that takes in sensor information and responds to that information by activating some of the actuators (or by doing nothing).

· Sensors – Devices that provide information about the environment to the robot’s controller.

· Actuators – Devices that convert a stored energy into another type of energy, usually motion (motors, pneumatic cylinders, …)

· Effectors – Devices that affect the environment (claws, lifts, …)

· Structure – The physical parts of the robot that physically hold everything together.

CLASSIFYING ROBOTS – LOCOMOTION VS MANIPULATION

Robot effectors can be used to move the robot itself around (locomotion) or to move other objects around (manipulation). This leads to two groups of robots:

· Mobile robots

· Manipulator robots

Of course, a single robot can often fall into both groups if it can manipulate the environment all while moving.

Terminology

RCV – A remote controlled vehicle is a device that is tele-operated by a human. It is different than a robot because it is controlled at all times by a human being where a robot has a computer program (or is sometime hardcoded) to use sensor and other information to determine and execute the next step.