APPLICATIONS OF ROBOTICS IN VARIOUS FIELDS & RECENT ADVANCEMENTS IN ROBOTICS

ABSTRACT

Robots are computer-controlled machines, programmed to sense and react to aspects of their environment. They are frequently used where working conditions are unsuitable for humans. As well as working at constant rate, robots can handle dangerous substances without fear of contamination, and can be built to function in extreme environments, such as outer space or deep under water.Its applications are------ should be widely used in maintenance and repair, in industries, in mines, in defense, in medical field and also in scientific field. Its recent advancements are laser cutting, oxy-fuel cutting, plasma and water-jet cutting, robotics surgery, calibration, explorations, etc.Our paper views mainly the introduction (parts of robot), its laws, applications, advancements, and conclusion.

KEYWORDS---dangerous, cuttings, surgery.

** Brain surgery which is difficult can be done using robot.

Introduction:Nowadays, the word robot is often applied to any device that works automatically or by sense control, especially a machine (automaton) that can be programmed to perform tasks normally done by people.

Definition—“A re-programmable, multifunctional, manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks”.For many people it is a machine that imitates a human- like the androids in Star Wars, Terminator and Star Trek.However much these robots capture our imagination, such robots still only inhabit Science Fiction.

What are the Laws of Robotics?The term robotics was coined in the 1940s by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. He imagined a world in which mechanical beings were mankind's devoted helpmates. They were constrained to obey what have become known as Asimov's Laws of Robotics:A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Parts of a Robot-----For a machine to qualify as a robot, it usually needs five main parts:

ControllerArmDriveEnd-effecterSensor

Controller---Every robot is connected to a computer, which keeps the pieces of the computer together. This computer is known as controller. The controller functions as the “brain” of the robot.

Arm--- The arm is the part of a robot that positions the end-effecter and sensors to do their pre- programmed business.

Drive----It is the “engine” that drives the links (the section between the joints in to their desired position).

End-Effecter--- It is the “hand” connected to the robot’s arm. It is often different from a human hand- it could be a tool such as a gripper, a vacuum pump, tweezers, scalpel, blow torch. Some robots can change end-effectors, and be reprogrammed for a different set of tasks.

Sensors--- The sensors sends information in the form of electronic signals back to the controller. It also gives the robot controller in formation about its surroundings.

So what is a robot?Well it is a system that contains sensors, control systems, manipulators, power supplies and software together to perform a task.Sensing, Energy, Movement, Intelligence are the characteristics.

Applications of robots:Robots are at work in many different industries in a wide range of applications throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico, including arc welding, machine tending, assembly, coating, spot welding, and dispensing.Painting--- Robots are specifically designed for high performance painting and spraying finishing in hazardous work environments. Maintenance is the process that preserves or restores a desired state of a system or facility. The maintenance process includes three major activities: Inspection, Planned Maintenance and Disturbance Handling.Robots, whether teleoperated, under supervisory control, or autonomous, have been used in a variety of applications in maintenance and repair.

Application Area Maintenance TaskInspection Planned Maintenance Disturbance Handling

Nuclear Industry Growing area, Well-established field much current activityespecially as new with several decades of related to decontami-facility designs successful robotic nation, decommissi-incorporate remote applications. oning, andmaintenance philosophy. dismantling.

Highways Relatively new area with Relatively new area, Of significant interestcurrent prototypes, except with quickly growing particularly for highas packaged with crack interest and a huge way integritysealing and pothole potential impact. management. Arepair systems. Several ongoing number ofefforts should result successful prototypein a number of new systems are graduallyrobot prototypes in making a way in tothe next 5 years. routine use. Severalnew efforts underway.

Railways Few current systems, Most common area of Little current use.and little ongoing railway robotics, butactivity. with little new activity.

Power line Little current use. Interest is increasing, Greatest area of currentMaintenance especially for robotic use, with muchtechniques that work potential growth due toon live power lines. Technology advances

and need to removehumans from highlydangerous tasks.

Aircraft Steadily growing Steadily growing area, little current use.Servicing area, due to recent especially for automatedadvances in automated stripping and painting.inspection technologies..Robotics has been of interest to mankind for over one hundred years. However our perception of robots has been influenced by the media and Hollywood.

One may ask what robotics is about? In my eyes, robots' characteristics change depending on the environment it operates in. Some of these are:

Outer Space - Manipulative arms that are controlled by a human are used to unload the docking bay of space shuttles to launch satellites or to construct a space station.

1. Robotic manipulators--- such devices are proposed for deployment in space or on planetary surfaces to emulate human manipulation capabilities; they may be deployed or free-flyer spacecraft or on-orbit servicing of other spacecraft, within space vehicles for payload tending, or on-planetary landers or rovers for the acquisition of samples;

2. Robotic rovers---such devices are proposed for deployment on planetary surfaces to emulate human mobility capabilities; they are typically deployed on the surfaces of terrestrial planets, small bodies of the solar system, planetary atmosphere (aerobots), or for penetration of ice layers (cryobots) or liquid layers (hydrobots).Robotic spacecraft

Space robots will capture diverse roles in future space engineering applications, serving as independent explorers including forerunners for manned expeditions, and partners in human space exploits. 

The Intelligent Home - Automated systems can now monitor home security, environmental conditions and energy usage. Door and windows can be opened automatically and appliances such as lighting and air conditioning can be pre programmed to activate. This assists occupants irrespective of their state of mobility.

Exploration - Robots can visit environments that are harmful to humans. An example is monitoring the environment inside a volcano or exploring our deepest oceans. NASA has used robotic probes for planetary exploration since the early sixties.

Military Robots - Airborne robot drones are used for surveillance in today's modern army. In the future automated aircraft and vehicles could be used to carry fuel and ammunition or clear minefields

Farms - Automated harvesters can cut and gather crops. Robotic diaries are available allowing operators to feed and milk their cows remotely.

The Car Industry - Robotic arms that are able to perform multiple tasks are used in the car manufacturing process. They perform tasks such as welding, cutting, lifting, sorting and bending.

Similar applications but on a smaller scale are now being planned for the food processing industry in particular the trimming, cutting and processing of various meats such as fish, lamb, beef.

Hospitals - Under development is a robotic suit that will enable nurses to lift patients without damaging their backs. Scientists in Japan have developed a power-assisted suit which will give nurses the extra muscle they need to lift their patients - and avoid back injuries.

It will allow caregivers to easily lift bed-ridden patients on and off beds.In its current state the suit has an aluminium exoskeleton and a tangle of wires and compressed-air lines trailing from it. Its advantage lies in the huge impact it could have for nurses.Research institutions and companies in Japan have been trying to create robotic nurses to substitute for humans. Yamamoto has taken another approach and has decided to create a device designed to help human nurses.

Robotics in medicineIn medicine, where extreme precision and delicacy is required, and the margin for error slim, robots are becoming increasingly important. Robots are performing heart surgery without opening patients’ chests, and robots are checking medical prescriptions for errors.

In tests, a nurse weighing 64 kilograms was able to lift and carry a patient weighing 70 kilograms. The suit is attached to the wearer's back with straps and belts. Sensors are placed on the wearer's muscles to measure strength. These send the data back to a microcomputer, which calculates how much more power is needed to complete the lift effortlessly..

Disaster Areas - Surveillance robots fitted with advanced sensing and imaging equipment can operate in hazardous environments such as urban setting damaged by earthquakes by scanning walls, floors and ceilings for structural integrity.

Entertainment - Interactive robots that exhibit behaviors and learning ability. SONY has one such robot which moves freely, plays with a ball and can respond to verbal instructions.

WeldingOne of the common applications of industrial robots is welding. Examples of robot welding include car bodies.

AssemblyMany of assembly robots exist in the automotive and electronics industries.

Home land security applications include:CBRNE Detection and Contaminant: Save lives of first-responders and citizens by sniffing out, locating and containing chemical/biological/nuclear/explosive threats.Border Patrol: Protect international borders against infiltration and terrorism.Perimeter surveillance/Asset protection: protect critical infrastructure and public venues from intrusion, vandalism and terrorist attack. Save lives of security and citizens, protect national economies.Advancements in robotics:

Date Significance Robot Name Inventor

1206 First programmable humanoid robot

mechanical boat with four automatic musicians

Al-Jazari

~1495 One of the first recorded designs of a mechanical knight Leonardo da

humanoid robot Vinci1738 Early automaton, a mechanical duck that

was able to eat grain, flap its wings, and excrete.

Jacques de Vaucanson

1920 Word robot coined.[21] Karel Čapek1930s Early humanoid robot. It was exhibited at

the 1939 and 1940 World's FairsElektro Westinghouse

Electric Corporation

1942 The word robotics appears in the science fiction short story Runaround.[24]

Isaac Asimov

1948 Simple robots which exhibit biological like behaviors.[25]

Elsie and Elmer William Grey Walter

1956 First robot company is founded by George Devol and Joseph Engelberger based on Devol's patents; first commercial robot.[26]

Unimate George Devol

1956 Phrase artificial intelligence is coined at a conference in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.[27]

Marvin Minsky & John McCarthy

1961 First industrial robot installed. Unimate1975 Programmable Universal Manipulation Arm

(a Unimation product)Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly

Victor Scheinman

1981 Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, is killed by a robot.

2000 A humanoid robot that can recognize human faces, see stereoscopically, walk and run on different types of ground (including stairs), and respond (in words and in actions) to English and Japanese commands.

ASIMO Honda Corporation

Rolling Robots

Segway in the Robot museum in Nagoya.For simplicity, most mobile robots have wheels. However, some researchers have tried to create more complex wheeled robots, with only one or two wheels.

Ballbot: Carnegie Mellon University researchers have developed a new type of mobile robot that balances on a ball instead of legs or wheels. "Ballbot" is a self-contained, battery-operated, omni directional robot that balances dynamically on a single urethane-coated metal sphere. It weighs 95 pounds and is the approximate height and width of a person. Because of its long, thin shape and ability to maneuver in tight spaces, it has the potential to function better than current robots can in environments with people.

Self-Reconfigurable (SR Robots):This is an analogy to biological systems in which all the differential cells are produced by cell division from a single cell after fertilization.CEBOT(1988) was the first SR robot designed based on heterogeneous components. It is composed of several different type modules, such as transportation, rotational joint, telescopic arm and grasping module.

Walking Robots

ICub robot, designed by the Robot Cub ConsortiumWalking is a difficult and dynamic problem to solve. Several robots have been made which can walk reliably on two legs; however none have yet been made which are as robust as a human. Typically, these robots can walk well on flat floors, can occasionally walk up stairs. None can walk over rocky, uneven terrain. Some of the methods which have been tried are:Zero Moment Point Technique: is the algorithm used by robots such as Honda's ASIMO. The robot's onboard computer tries to the keep the total inertial forces (the combination of earth's gravity and the acceleration and deceleration of walking), exactly opposed by the floor reaction force (the force of the floor pushing back on the robot's foot). In this way, the two forces cancel out, leaving no moment (force causing the robot to rotate and fall over).

Hopping: Several robots, built in the 1980s by Marc Raibert at the MIT Leg Laboratory, successfully demonstrated very dynamic walking. Initially, a robot with only one leg, and a very small foot, could stay upright simply by hopping. The movement is the same as that of a person on a pogo stick. As the robot falls to one side, it would jump slightly in that direction, in order to catch itself. Soon, the algorithm was generalized to two and four legs. A bipedal robot was demonstrated running and even performing somersaults. A quadruped was also demonstrated which could trot, run, pace and bound.

Dynamic Balancing: A more a dynamic balancing algorithm, which is potentially more robust than the Zero Moment Point technique, as it constantly monitors the robot's motion, and places the feet in order to main stability. This technique was recently demonstrated by Anybots' Dexter Robot, which is so stable, it can even jump.

Human Interaction

Kismet (robot) can produce a range of facial expressionsIf robots are to work effectively in homes and other non-industrial environments, the way they are instructed to perform their jobs and especially how they will be told to stop will be of critical importance. The people who interact with them may have little or no training in robotics, and so any interface will need to be extremely intuitive. Science fiction authors also typically assume that robots will eventually communicate with humans by talking, gestures and facial expressions, rather than a command-line interface. Although speech would be the most natural way for the human to communicate, it is quite unnatural for the robot.

Speech Recognition: Interpreting the continuous flow of sounds coming from a human, in real time, is a difficult task for a computer, mostly because of the great variability of speech. The same word, spoken by the same person may sound different depending on local acoustics, volume, the previous word, whether or not the speaker has a cold, etc. It becomes even harder when the speaker has a different accent. Nevertheless, great strides have been made in the field since Davis, Biddulph, and Balashek designed the first "voice input system" which recognized "ten digits spoken by a single user with 100% accuracy" in 1952. Currently, the best systems can recognise continuous, natural speech, up to 160 words per minute, with an accuracy of 95%.

Gestures: One can imagine, in the future, explaining to a robot chef how advanced way for a robot to walk is by using to make a pastry, or asking directions from a robot police officer. On both of these occasions, making hand gestures would aid the verbal descriptions. In the first case, the robot would be recognizing gestures made by the human, and perhaps repeating them for confirmation. In the second case, the robot police officer would gesture to indicate "down the road, then turn right". It is quite likely that gestures will make up a part of the interaction between humans and robots. A great many systems have been developed to recognise human hand gestures.

Facial expression: Facial expressions can provide rapid feedback on the progress of a dialog between two humans, and soon it may be able to do the same for humans and robots. A robot should know how to approach a human, judging by their facial expression and body language. Whether the person is happy, frightened or crazy-looking affects the type of interaction expected of the robot. Likewise, a robot like Kismet can produce a range of facial expressions, allowing it to have meaningful social exchanges with humans.

Personality: Many of the robots of science fiction have personality, and that is something which may or may not be desirable in the commercial robots of the future. Nevertheless, researchers are trying to create robots which appear to have a personality i.e. they use sounds, facial expressions and body language to try to convey an internal state, which may be joy, sadness or fear. One commercial example is Pleo, a toy robot dinosaur, which can exhibit several apparent emotions.Economic impactGiven that in the next two decades robots will be capable of replacing humans in most manufacturing and service jobs, economic development will be primarily determined by the advancement of robotics. Given JAPAN’S current strength in this field, it may well become the economic lead Robotics in 2020.

Robotics in 2020:Robots may be commonplace: in home, factories, agriculture, building & construction, undersea, space, mining, hospitals and streets; for repair, construction, maintenance, security, entertainments, companionship, care.

Purposes of these Robots:Robotized space vehicles and facilitiesAnthropomorphic general-purpose robots with hands like humans used for factory jobs - Intelligent robots for unmanned plants - Totally automated factories will be commonplace.Robots for guiding blind people and home automation for the elderly and disabled.Robots for almost any job in home or hospital, including Robo-surgery.Housework robots for cleaning, washing, transporting etc - Domestic robots will be small, specialized and attractive (= cuddly).

Properties of these robots:Autonomous, with environmental awareness sensors.Self recharging, self diagnostic and self repairing.More sophisticated artificial brains, perhaps with ten thousand or more cells, combined with electronic circuits.

Current Developments:

After five decades of development, robotics technology is approaching its infancy. Many of the promises of science fiction have yet to be realised, and our imagination still far exceeds our ability to manufacture and program. However, the technology is developing quite rapidly on all fronts, including intelligence, sensing, manipulation and actuation, walking gait and navigation.

What is the future for robots?Robotic pets, lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners are already on the market. Sony have developed a humanoid entertainment robot named QRIO. Rapid advances are being made in robotic control systems, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and in the miniaturisation, sophistication and reliability of electronic circuitry, sensors and actuators. Robots currently under development may become widely used in the food, clothing, nuclear and offshore industries, healthcare, farming, transportation, mining and defence.

Will robots take over from humans?

The sensible answer to the question as to whether robots will take over is that they probably won’t in the near future. There are many reasons for this. The first is that the robots of today have puny brains compared to humans, and they do not have the ability to organise in the same way as humans. Our societies are very complex and allow us to achieve many very advanced things. It is unlikely that robots could overtake us in the near future. Even so, it is something that we should keep an eye on, since all scientists have a responsibility not to do things that damage society.