Artificial Intelligence for Robotics

Robot anatomy – what are robots made of?

In our limited definition of robots as meaning mobile machines that have sensors and interact with their environment, there is a fairly standard collection of components and parts that make up the vast majority of robots. Even robots as outwardly different as a self-driving car, the welding robot that built the car, and a Roomba vacuum cleaner, are actually composed of some version of the same parts. Some will have more components, others less, but pretty much all robots will have the following categories of parts (Reference: Murphy, Robin R. Introduction to AI Robotics, MIT Press, 2000, Chapter 1):

• Controller: A unit that runs the programming that controls the robot. This can be a traditional ...