Question: What is the part of creating a robot?

Huma Shah answered on 17 Nov 2016:

Hello,

There are lots of activities involved in creating a robot.

First there will be the design of the robot and that design will depend on the purpose, what the robot will be used for. A robot with a human type body is not needed for manufacturing robots that do heavy lifting – such a robot needs a strong lifting arm.

Once the purpose and the design has been decided then, the mechatronics is in place to build and put together the body parts. The electrical components will be developed to ensure control of the robot’s structure/body. In some instances a robot will need a brain, for example to see things and avoid moving into them. So a delivery robot will need sensors to ensure its vision can recognise, movie smoothly and avoid.

A higher level robot that is designed to interact with humans in natural language, like the talking robots we see in movies like ‘I, ROBOT’, or in TV shows like ‘HUMANS’, requires a lot more design and technological advances, this is because we have not yet progressed to build talking robots. Conversation is a major challenge in robotics and artificial intelligence.

As you can imagine, there’s lots involved, so lots of room for many different people to come together to design and develop robots, from artists, to psychologists, linguists, ethicists, sociologists, historians, archaeologists engineers, computer scientists and anthropologists. All have skills needed to creating robots.

Hope this answers your question and you take robotics up beyond school.

Huma