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Robots of the Future
By: Andrew Case, Jefff Bayse, and Jeff Pisctelli

Table of Contents

1.The Future of Robots 2.Programming Concepts 3.Robot Control 4.Robot Hardware 5.Mathematics of Robot Control 6.Robot Programming Languages 7.Obstacle Avoidance 8.Task Planning and Navigation 9.Robot Vision 10.Knowledge Based Vision Systems 11.Robots and Artificial Intelligence

CH.1 Future in Robots Website on future of Robotics

The Future Car

By combining hydrogen fuel with oxygen, fuel cells can produce plenty of electric power while emitting only pure water as exhaust. They're so clean that astronauts actually drink the water produced by fuel cells on the space shuttle. CH.2 Robots in Military Aurora - Secret Hypersonic Spyplane Continually growing evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. Perhaps the most well-known event which provides evidence of such a craft's existence is the sighting of a triangular plane over the North Sea in August 1989 by oil-exploration engineer Chris Gibson. As well as the famous "skyquakes" heard over Los Angeles since the early 1990s, found to be heading for the secret Groom Lake installation in the Nevada desert, numerous other facts provide an understanding of how the aircraft's technology works. Rumored to exist but routinely denied by U.S. officials, the name of this aircraft is Aurora. Programming Concepts

The development of robot programming concepts is almost as old as the develop-ment of robot manipulators itself. As the ultimate goal of industrial robotics has been (and still is!) the development of sophisticated production machines with the hope to reduce costs in manufacturing areas like material handling, welding, spray-painting and assembly, tremendous efforts have been undertaken by the interna-tional robotics community to design user-friendly and at the same time powerful programming methods. The evolution reaches from early control concepts on the hardware level via point-to-point and simple motion level languages to motion-oriented structured robot programming languages. CH.3Robot Control

The heart of the Innovation First FRC Control System is the Operator Interface and the Robot Controller. The Operator Interface takes input from the robot operators and passes it to the Robot Controller through the Radio Modems. The Robot Controller takes this information, gathers additional information from sensors on-board the robot, determines how the robot should function, and instructs the robot to perform the functions. The Robot Controller also sends data back to the Operator Interface, giving the robot operators feedback of critical information. Robot System and Operator System CH.4 Robot Hardware

The hardware needed to built a robot is diverse. It depends on what type of robot you are building. If it is an automated factory worker the hardware could involve all sorts of sophisticated and heavy industry tools.

If, on the other hand, you are working to build a humanoid or space exploration robot, the hardware can be muscle wire, or sensitive lenses, for example. Examples of Parts Chassis-This is the main part of the robot. The base plate is made from 1/8" aluminium plate, the side brackets from 1/8" right angle bracket. Drippler/Kicker-This is the dribbler/kicker housing. It was printed on our FDM 3000 machine using ABS plastic. Cover/Backpiece-These two parts are the cover and the battery cover (back piece). The cover is made out of 1/32" clear polycarbonate sheet that is folded and then painted black. The back piece was printed with the FDM 3000 machine using ABS plastic. CH.5 Mathematics of Robot Control  A robot control language (ARCL) which is based on Pascal-like syntax is presented. Language constructs are designed to allow robot motion control with relative and absolute commands to all its motors. In addition, sensory control of robot sensors is allowed by enable and disable commands. Robot speech is programmed using phonemes, and a dictionary of commonly used words facilitates speech programming. Implementation of a language cross-compiler with an IBM PC as the host machine and a HERO robot as the target robot/processor, is discussed.  CH.6 Robot Programming Languages  The basic idea behind these approaches is, to relieve the programmer from know-ing all specific machine details and free him from coding every tiny motion/action; rather, he is specifying his application on a high abstraction level, telling the ma-chine in an intuitive way what has to be done and not how this has to be done. This implicit programming concept implies many complex modules leading to auto-mated robot programming. E.g., there is a need for user-friendly human interfaces for specifying robot applications; this may range from graphical specifica-tions/annotations within a CAD environment, till to spoken commands or gestures, interpreted by some speech understanding or vision system respectively. These commands have to be converted automatically into a sequence of actions/motions by a task planning system. The following is a simple example of Karel syntax BEGINNING-OF-PROGRAM DEFINE turnright AS BEGIN turnleft; turnleft; turnleft END BEGINNING-OF-EXECUTION ITERATE 3 TIMES turnright; move; turnoff END-OF-EXECUTION END-OF-PROGRAM

CH.7 Obstacle Avoidance

Obstacle Avoidance is a robotic discipline with the objective of moving vehicles on the basis of the sensorial information. The use of these methods front to classic methods (path planning) is a natural alternative when the scenario is dynamic with an unpredictable behaviour. In these cases, the surroundings do not remain invariable, and thus the sensory information is used to detect the changes consequently adapting moving.

The research conducted faces two major problems in this discipline. The first is two move vehicles in troublesome scenarios, where current technology has proven limited aplicability. The second one is to understand the role of the vehicle characteristics (shape, kinematics and dynamics) within the obstacle avoidance paradigm. CH.8 Task Planning and Navigation The exact methods are proprietary, but are based on algorithms shown to be reliable and efficient by past robotics research, and which are described in many robotics textbooks and published papers.

The path planning module in ARNL computes a safe path from the robot's current pose to a destination pose. It then sends the appropriate velocities and heading commands to the robot to make it follow the computed path as closely as possible while avoiding unmapped obstacles in its path. CH.9 Robot Vision One of the most fundamental tasks that vision is very useful for is the recognition of objects (be they machine parts, light bulbs, DVDs, or your next door neighbor!). Evolution Robotics introduced a significant milestone in the near-realtime recognition of objects based on SIFT points. The software identifies points in an image that look the same even if the object is moved, rotated or scaled by some small degree. Matching these points to previously seen image points allows the software to 'understand' what it is looking at even if it does not see exactly the same image. CH.10 Knowledge Based Vision Systems The aim of the project was to develop a knowledge-based 3D vision system. The question was how model knowledge can be used to assist 3D vision in typical applications. To give an answer to this question, we investigated ways to apply knowledge as well as flexible control schemes to the 3D vision problem in the frame of two specific vision environments: a development platform for 3D vision from range data on one hand and an experimental vision system for robotics and automated assembly on the other. CH.11 Robots and Artificial Intelligence Tweenbots are cute little robots with few skills of their own other than being able to slowly move forward. At 10 inches high, tweenbots have a hard time navigating even the smallest of obstacles needing lots of help from humans passing by.

The tiny robots are the creation of Kacie Kinzer, an arts student interested in studying something I don't understand, "...finding ways to provided more textured and meaningful experiences through technology--particularly in relation to the transmission of narrative." Regardless, this Tisch School of the Arts student created the tweenbots which are capable of navigating long distances in urban settings relying heavily on the kindness of strangers to point them in the right direction.

If you thought that the robots would never reach their destination, think again. With the help of other pedestrians, tweenbots have successfully navigated considerable distances such as crossing the Washington Square Park in 42 minutes.