Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines | Date: 30 April 2011, 05:04
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Although true robots are a creation of the second half of the 20th
century, the idea of the robot has stirred the human imagination
for a much longer period of time.
Images of artificial people and mechanical servants stretch back
even to the days of ancient myth. For example, the Greek god of
metalwork, called Vulcan or Hephaestus, was said to have created
two kinds of mechanical servants: graceful golden handmaidens
and (more practically perhaps) tables that walked by themselves on
three legs.
In medieval Jewish lore, a golem was a clay statute that could
be animated by a magician using incantations from the Kabbalah.
The instructions for a golem’s operation were inscribed on a scroll
and placed inside the being’s head. In one legend, a golem was given
instructions to fill a well, but its scroll did not tell it when to stop
filling it. Soon the house was overflowing with water in what was
perhaps the world’s first programming error. Fear of losing control
has always been part of our primal response to robots.
Automatons and the Age of Reason
The Renaissance brought new interest in the structures and mechanisms
of the human body, and in the late 15th and early 16th centuries,
the famed artist-inventor Leonardo da Vinci made sketches
of many mechanisms based on principles he found in nature. One
such drawing showed a mechanical knight that could move its head
and jaw, sit up, and wave its arms.
By the 18th century, the construction of elaborate automatons
had become the rage in the royal courts of Europe. One inventor,
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eINTRODUCTION
Jacques de Vaucanson, built an android or humanlike automaton
that could play the flute. Another Vaucanson creation, a mechanical
duck, could simulate eating, digestion, and defecation. It should be
noted, however, that these automata, despite their complexity, were
not true robots in the modern sense. Everything they did was dictated
step by step by the action of clockwork, cams, or other mechanisms.
Their actions were fixed and unvarying, without regard for
the people or things in the surrounding environment.
The automaton seemed to symbolize the triumph of the Age of
Reason, a time when a newly confident science mastered the secrets
of gravity and motion. To many observers, these developments in
theory and technology suggested that if a machine could be made to
imitate the actions of animals and even people, perhaps living things
were merely elaborate automatons whose mechanism would soon be
uncovered by science.
Anticipating Robots:
20th-Century Science Fiction
At the dawn of the 20th century, an explosion of new scientific
theories and inventions led to the creation of a literature that sought
to explore their implications and a variety of possible futures. In
the science fiction magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, the alien
“bug-eyed monsters” were often accompanied by hulking robots.
These robots were often relentless in their attempts to carry out
some sort of evil plan.
Robots also appeared in other media. Indeed, the word robot
is first found in the 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots by the
Czech playwright Karel Capek. Here and in Fritz Lang’s 1927
movie Metropolis, the robot took on a social dimension, symbolizing
the threat of automation to human livelihoods and suggesting
the relentless metronome-like pace of the industrial world.
While many writers caused people to fear robots, Isaac Asimov
inspired a generation of engineers to build them. In Asimov’s stories,
robots were the (usually) reliable servants of humankind, built
to obey laws that would prevent them from harming people.
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