Python All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 1

Introduction to Robotics

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding what a robot is

Types of robots

Knowing the parts of a robot

Robots. That’s a name that has been bandied about for a hundred years. It comes from a Czech word, robota, which means “involuntary labor.” It was first used in the 1920 play “R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots” by Karel Capek, but it was really Capek’s brother Josef who coined the word. Did you know there was a robot in Frank Baum’s land of Oz in 1907? He didn’t call it a robot, but it’s definitely a robot.

Robots are everywhere in today’s modern world. Your house is filled with them. How is that possible? To understand what we are talking about, you need to understand the definition of robot more in computer-science terms than in Hollywood’s.

A Robot Is Not Always like a Human

Two things to know about robots:

• Robots have only two features, a computer and an actuator.
• Robots are dumb; they are not people.

Robots have computers of some kind; think of it as the machine’s brain. These brains can vary from IBM’s Watson to a small eight-bit processor with a few thousand bytes of RAM. (You will see this with Baxter the Coffee-Making Robot — yes, Baxter has ...