Chapter 1 ROBOTICS Robotics is the science of building machines that sense their environment and make decisions by themselves These machines are known as robots They come in many shapes and sizes Sometimes human operators control robots Other times the robots work entirely on their own Some robots can be controlled with laptop computers What two things are robots able to
People have long dreamed of machines that could replace human workers The philosopher Aristotle wrote about this in the 300s BCE In 1495 CE inventor Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of a mechanical knight he imagined Modern engineers have rebuilt Leonardo's robot according to his original
Robots appeared in fiction before they were used in real life The term robot was coined in 1921 Karel Capek used it in a play he wrote about mechanical workers Capek was Czech The word robot came from the Czech word for labor I Capek's play featured mechanical workers left that fought back against their owners H 4 6
The Three Laws of Robotics Isaac Asimov was a famous science fiction writer In his stories he developed laws that all robots should obey The first is that robots must never hurt people The second is that they must obey humans And the third is that they must protect themselves unless it would hurt a person These laws introduced in the 1940s later influenced the development of real robots Asimov introduced the term robotics in a 1941 short
