INTRODUCTION TO ROBOTICS

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about futuristic wars between humans and robots, robots taking over the world and enslaving humans. Movies like The Terminator, Star Wars, etc., have propogated these ideas faster than anything else. These movies are beautiful works of fi ction and present us with an interesting point of view to speculate. However, the truth is much different but equally as interesting as the fi ction. If you look around yourself you will see several machines and gizmos within your surroundings. When you use a simple pair of spectacles, do you become nonliving? When an elderly person uses a hearing aid or a physically challenged person uses an artifi cial leg or arm do they become half machine? Yes, they do. Now we are rapidly moving toward an era where we will have chips embedded

inside our bodies. Chips will communicate with our biological sensors and will help us in performing several activities more effi ciently. An artifi cial retina is almost at the fi nal stages of its development. Now we are thinking in terms of nanobots helping us to strengthen our immune systems. Now we are already on the verge of becoming half machine. Chips will be implanted inside our bodies imparting telescopic and microscopic abilities in our eyes. Cell phones will be permanently placed inside the ear. We will communicate with different devices not through a control panel or keyboard; rather these devices will receive commands from the brain directly. The next level of development will be the part of the brain being replaced by chips, which will impart more capability to the brain. You may ask, do we need all these? The answer is that the biological evolution has already become obsolete. It is unable to keep pace with the rate at which humans are growing. Many of our primary intuitions, such as mating behavior, are still millions of years old. Evolution happens only after millions of years. But humans have built the entire civilization in only 10,000 years. And now the rate of growth has become exponential. Now we need to replace our brain’s decision-making software with faster/better ones. So, where are we heading? Yes, we are slowly becoming robots. Robots are not our competitors on this planet. They are our successors. Robots are the next level in evolution; rather we can call it robolution. We will begin our journey with a brief history of robotics.