Models with clockwork mechanisms that mimic human and animal behaviour were first developed in the 17th century. By the 18th century Pierre Jacquest-Droz had built three mechanical dolls, one could play music on an organ, one write and the other draw a simple picture. This was some of the first attempts of creating automata. In the 19th century Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace designed the first general purpose programmable computing machine. Charles wanted to liberate humans from the drudgery of arithmetic. Computers would become thought of as the brains of a robot.. "Robots" were first popularised by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek. In his play "Rossums's Universal Robots" humans create humanoid robots. These robots are built to work for humans. "Robota" in Czechoslovakian means; worker or slave. The play made the front cover of "The Tatler" in 1923 and brought robots to the general attention.There have been significant milestones in robotics one being "Grey Walter's Tortoise" designed and built in the 1950's by W. Grey Walter. This robot was programmed with behaviours (now known as behaviour based robotics). It exhibited actions such as, seek light, head towards weak light, back away from bright light, turn & push and finally recharge battery. The behaviours were organised by what we now call a subsumption architecture. After the "Grey Walter's tortoises" robot- programming techniques would follow a different line to what is now called "the traditional approach" or "classical AI" and then later in the 1980's return back to behaviour based robotics (although with classical AI still being worked on to date).
"Shakey" built in the late 60's was very big, linked to a computer the size of a room and took hours to locate a block and then move it. However the ability to achieve such goals was seen as a breakthrough. Shakey used a sense-model-plan-act architecture. The idea is that to exist and act in an environment you must have a complete symbolic model of your world. Then you can plan, make decisions and carry out tasks. In 1986 Rodney Brooks at MIT labs challenged this line of thinking. Brooks work involved several robots programmed with behaviour based architectures. The robots were successful at navigating unstructured real world environments a task that had eluded traditional robots.
The dream is to create robots that can think, make decisions and react to their environment. Scientists hope to develop robots that can live alongside humans helping us and making our lives easier. The environment it must exist in will influence design and programming techniques. Also the goals we set for the robot, the tasks we want it to perform will influence the design and programming techniques used. This may or may not lead to the traditional humanoid appearance that springs to mind when people think of robots. All of this is a long way from the early clockwork models of the 17th century. However people's perception of the type of robot we should now be able to achieve sometimes exceeds what is in reality possible. Perhaps we have underestimated the vast complexity and abilities of a human being and only now are we beginning to see the size of the task involved in creating thinking, reacting, decision making robots.
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