How Strong is Your Robot ?

Mei 22, 2013

How Strong is Your Robot ?

The popular image of a robot is that of an android, a machine that looks like a man or woman and performs tasks that are copies of human actions. In reality, few robots are of this type. Present day robots are much more likely to be mechanical arms which are controlled by computers and which can be programmed to perform a wide range of activities normally done by humans. However, if this popular image of robots is a mistake, it is equally wrong to think of them as merely machines. Robots and the science of robotics are both signs of the deep changes that are taking place in industry, changes that are beginning to have and will continue to have far-reaching economic, social and political consequences.

human vs robot

Before robots, there were mechanical dolls, but they were used for pleasure rather than for work. They go back to ancient times. One of the earliest examples of these dolls is a wooden model of pigeon made by Architas of Tarrentus around 350 BC. The bird was suspended from the end of a bar and was moved by means of compressed air. During the eighteenth century, a well-known Swiss clockmaker, Pierre Jacquet-Droiz, produced a puppet that was programmed to write any text up to forty characters long. So lifelike wa is that, at one point, people in Spain thought Jacquet-Droiz had magical powers and they tried to have him arrested as a sorcerer, or magician.

The first international robot was used in 1961 in the General Motors factory in Trenton, New Jersey, USA. It lifted hot pieces of metal from a machine and put them in piles. Today’s robots are described as ‘first generation’ robots. That is, they will follow a routine exactly as programmed. However, they have one serious disadvantage. If the sequence of events in which robot plays a part does not conform exactly to the programmer’s expectations, things can go very wrong, or 180 degrees beyond expectation. For example, a robot’s program may instruct it to pick something up and place it on a conveyor belt. As long as the production rate is constant, and the conveyor belt keeps moving, the system will work perfectly. However, if the machine breaks down, or the conveyor belt stops, damage may result both to the robot and to the machine.

Today, there are over 100,000 robots in use troughout Japan, Western Europe, and the USA, and their number is increasing rapidly. They are already beginning to affect the composition of a manufacturing company’s workforce and, as a consequence, are raising important social and political questions. For instance, if robots can take over jobs, what will people do with their spare time and how will they earn money? It is a big question, how well this question and others like it are answered will lagely determine the future political stability of a world inhabited both by robots and by humans.

written by Resky Ervaldi Saputra

thank you for reading ^^