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Robots History
Robots History
History of
Robotics
Pre-History of Real-World
Robots:
• One of the first robots was the clepsydra or
water clock, which was made in 250 B.C.
History of Robotics?
RUR
Metropolis(1927)
Forbidden planet(1956)
2001 A Space Odyssey(1968)
Logans Run(1976)
Aliens(1986)
Robot
RobotContinuum
continuum
...
1921
Robot Continuum
Karl Capek
...
1921 2020
Robot
RobotContinuum
continuum
Karl Capek
Dalek
...
1921 2020 2150
Robot
RobotContinuum
continuum
Karl Capek
Dalek
...
1921 2020 2150 2421
Robot
RobotContinuum
continuum
Let us step down fantasies…..
“Tortoise”
...
1951
• Other early robots (1940's - 50's) were Grey
Walter’s “Elsie the Tortoise” ("Machina
speculatrix") and the Johns Hopkins "beast."
History of
Real-
World
Robots:
Grey Walter's tortoise, restored recently by Owen Holland
Walking robots
History of Real-World
Robots:
... ...
1968
Shakey the
robot.
Shakey was the first
mobile robot that
could think
independently
and interact with
its surroundings
• Conceived as a demonstration
project for the Advanced
Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) artificial Intelligence
program
Shakey (cont)
• Shakey could be given a task such as finding a box of a given
size, shape, and color and told to move it to a designated
position.
• Shakey was able to search for the box in various rooms, cope
with obstacles, and plan a suitable course of action.
• It was controlled by an off-board PDP-10 computer through a
radio link.
• It carried :
– a TV camera,
– an optical range finder,
– and touch sensors
so that it could know when it bumped into something.
Shakey (cont)
Shakey (cont)
• While Shakey was a success in some respects it
was a great failure as far as autonomy was
concerned...
• It was controlled by an off-board computer
• It could only detect the baseboards of the
special rooms it worked in
• It could not deal with an unconstrained
environment
• It was really slow!
Shakey
Shakey (cont)
Nils Nilsson @ Stanford Research Inst.
first “general-purpose” mobile platform
sp
tv
sh
tvg
Bedroom (B)
... ...
1968
Shakey (cont)
Shakey Start
START
ACTIONS
At(sh,L) At(sp,K) At(tvg,B) At(tv,L)
• Go(x,y)
Preconditions: At(sh,x)
Go(L,B) Push(tv,L,B)
Postconditions: At(sh,y)
Go(L,K) Push(tv,L,K)
At(sh,K) At(sp,K)
• Push(obj,x,y)
At(tvg,B) At(tv,K)
Preconditions: At(sh,x) At(obj,x)
Postconditions: At(sh,y) At(obj,y)
world modeling
task execution
SENSING
motor control
ACTING
Hans Moravec @ SAIL
perception
planning
“functional” task decomposition
... ...
1976
AI - Historical
Perspective
• Artificial Intelligence began with very ambitious goals in the 1950s & 60s
• Most initial work on AI focused on severely abstracted “toy problems”
• Recent work (mid-80s to present) has been very successful in finding
applications that are firmly grounded in the real world
– Intelligent assistants
– Computer vision for navigation, graphics
– Robotics systems for manufacturing
– Speech analysis & generation
• Basic observations:
– Artificial Intelligence has specialized into many inter-related but distinct
disciplines
– Tasks performed effortlessly by humans & animals often are the hardest to
emulate
History of AI
• 1947~1959
– cybernetics 1947
• McCulloch and Pitts (1943) – Dartmouth 1956
– Neural networks that learn
• Minsky (1951) • 1960~1964
– Built a neural net computer – LISP(1960)
– GPS(1963)
• Darmouth conference (1956):
– McCarthy, Minsky, Newell, Simon met,
– Logic theorist (LT)- proves a theorem in Principia Mathematica-Russel.
– The name “Artficial Intelligence” was coined.
• 1952-1969
– GPS- Newell and Simon
– Geometry theorem prover - Gelernter (1959)
– Samuel Checkers that learns (1952)
– McCarthy - Lisp (1958), Advice Taker, Robinson’s resolution
– Microworlds: Integration, block-worlds.
– 1962- the perceptron convergence (Rosenblatt)
History of AI, continued
• 1966-1974 a dose of reality EasyFinder
– Problems with computation Excite Live
FarCast
• 1969-1979 Knowledge-based systems (Electronic Commerce)
– Weak vs. strong methods Mysimon
Amazon
– Prolog(1973) CDNow
– Expert systems: eWatch
• Dendral : Inferring molecular structures Careersite
• Mycin: diagnosing blood infections Intelligent Miner
• Prospector: recomending exploratory drilling (Duda).
– Roger Shank: no syntax only semantics
• 1980-1988: AI becomes am industry
– R1: McDermott, 1982, order configurations of computer systems
– 1981: Fifth generation
• 1986-present: return to neural networks
• Recent event:
– Hidden Markov models, planning, belief network
Key Schools of Thought in
AI and Robotics now
•1. Symbolic AI
– The physical symbol hypothesis
(Newell & Simon, 1976)
•A physical symbol system has the necessary & sufficient means for general intelligent action
•2. Sub-symbolic AI
– Connectionist/neural net approaches
•Rely on signals, not symbols
SENSING
ACTING
identify objects
build maps
explore
wander
avoid objects
... ...
1985
Cartland
Where do we go from
here?
• There are many many problems that
subsumption does not address, including
adaptation through learning
• There is still much work to be done and it
doesn't have to cost that much money.
• Try building one of these yourself.
• 1.In this class you will
learn programming
language Lisp - especially
Problems
suited for robotics. You • 3. Many of above ideas
should already know were programmed by us in
Basic of C. Think how Basic. The Visual Basic
would you program robots environment from
with behaviors described Microsoft allows for
above. interfacing, voice
• 2. If you feel your recognition and synthesis
knowledge of and robot vision. If you are
programming is interested in these areas, try
insufficient, start learning to review Visual Basic now.
LISP now. It is located on PCs in the
lab.
Sources
• Padhraic Smyth
• Kiriakos Kutulakos, University of Rochester
• Rojas FUB MI
• Behnke
• A. Ferworn
• Dodd, Harvey Mudd College
• Internet
• Brian Glassman, Mechanical Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology
• John Gallagher, SUNY Institute of Technology