Robotics

Robotics is the science of designing, building, and using Robots for a set of tasks. A relatively young field, Robotics draws from many fields of engineering, incluiding Mechanical engineering, Electrical engineering, Computer science, and Mathematics.

History

The term "Robotics" was first attributed to Isaac Asimov, a university professor and Science fiction writer, in his short story Runaround, published in 1942.

Unusually, the driving force for much development in robotics may be due the efforts of Science fiction authors. Authors such as Asimov esentially defined the popular perception of a robot, and their works may have been the inspiration for the current genereation of roboticists. Recently, Robots have appeared in mainstream movies such as I, Robot, Bicentennial Man, and Artificial Intelligence.

Related Fields

Computer vision Control Electronics Kinematics

Applications

Industrial

The most popular applications of robotics is in manufaturing.

While Industrial robots were first marketed in 1960,

Consumer

It has only been recently that consumer robotic products have appeared on the market. Among the most popular are the Sony's Aibo, Wowee's Robosapien, Roboraptor, and Robosapien V2, and the as-yet un-released Pleo.

Military

Packbot

External Links

A History Timeline of Robotics http://trueforce.com/Articles/Robot_History.htm