Do you know about robots? 🤖

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Speaker 1: You're listening to sleep Tight Science. Did you know the size of the smallest robot is less than one one thousands part of a millimeter. What it is called a nanobot, which is smaller than a period. Wow, Hello friends, and welcome back to sleep Tight Science, a bedtime show that answers the questions you have about science. When you think of a robot, what picture do you have inside your head? Some people think of automated humanoid machines with mono tone voices. Although some robots look like humans, most operational robots have none of the physical features of a human. Robots have often been associated with science fiction like my favorite Wally, and they are extensively used in factories and other places of production for their mechanical services. Today, we find them all around us in our homes, offices, schools, and malls, to name a few places. Robots are some of the most fascinating inventions out there. In this episode, we are going to start to learn all about robots and try to answer some of the questions that our listeners have submitted about these machines. Before we answer some of the questions, let's learn some basic facts. First. A robot is a machine that is more than just a tool. These machines are created to serve various purposes and perform many different functions. Like tools, they are designed to make human life easier. Unlike tools, robots can work independently. They need a power supply to give them the energy to do work, and they are sensitive. This means that they can respond to changes in their environment and do things based on what these changes tell them. The word robot is taken from the check word robota, which roughly translate to force, labor or drudgery, not exactly positive words to us humans, but many robots do exactly that. They work long hours performing repetitive tasks that humans don't want to do. If a robot is simply a machine and a toaster is a machine, does that make a toaster a robot too? In some ways, a toaster is a robot. A toaster has a task and replicates a previous human action, just like many robots. A toaster also has a sensor that responds to the environment around it. When that sensor is hot enough, the toast magically pops up. But a toaster does not work independently. It needs a human to put the bread in the toaster and press the lever down to turn it on. Toaster is not a robot. The science and study of robots is called robotics, a term created by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Scientists study, design, manufacture, and experiment with robots and robotics. Robotics is a multidisciplinary field, which means it puts together several areas. We were sent a whole bunch of questions about robots, so it seems many of you are really interested in knowing about these machines. Let's start with some of the shorter questions and then we will answer a few more. Is a robot a computer? No, a robot is considered a machine and not a computer. The computer gives the machine its intelligence and its ability to perform tasks. Did you know that the first computer was as long as four buses and was called Colossus. It was built in the United Kingdom and turned on in nineteen forty three, But it was a bit of a secret because it was created to crack secret codes. Today's mobile phones contain many, many times more computing power than early computers. Like Colossus, is a robot always run by a computer. Robots weren't always controlled by computers, but today most are even if the computer is very simple. We normally describe robots as having three major parts, a part that senses, a part that plans, and a part that acts. Throughout history, we have had mechanical robots. Robots today are controlled by computers, and they have computers inside them. Do robots poop? Researchers at Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK have created a robot that can feed on biomass and yes, poop. This robot is called the Ecobot three, and it has an artificial stomach that allows it to survive on fluid food and water for seven days without help from us humans. Once every twenty four hours, the recycled food is pushed through a pump into a litter tray, making this robot the first that can poop. Do robots have rules in stories? They do? The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov created the Three Laws of Robotics, a set of rules about robots found in his science fiction books. They were intended as a safety device to make sure the robots in his stories always obeyed humans and didn't attempt to harm their creators. The Three Laws don't actually exact exist and no technology yet created can understand or follow them, but they helped people stop thinking of robots as a threat. The three laws are one, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction or not doing anything, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the first law. Three, a robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second laws. Later, he provided an additional law, A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction or not doing anything, allow humanity to come to harm. Why do you think people were so afraid of robots in the past. What is the history of robots? Robots first appeared in the ancient world. During the Industrial Revolution, humans developed the ability to control electricity so that machines could be powered with small motors. In the early twentieth century, the notion of a humanoid machine, one that looks like a human was developed. The first uses of modern robots were in factories as industrial robots. These industrial robots were fixed machines that had manufacturing tasks that allowed for less human work. Industrial robots with artificial intelligence have been built since the two thousands. One of the first examples of a mechanical device built to regularly carry out a particular task occurred around three thousand BC. Egyptian water clocks used human figurines to strike the hour bells. In four hundred BC, Artus, inventor of the pulley and the screw, also created a mechanical wooden dove that could fly up to two hundred meters and flap its wings. This invention's exact details and mechanics are unknown, but some guess that the dove was connected to a cable attached to a pully and counterweight, which allowed the dove to fly. In the first century AD, Petronius Arbiter made a doll that could move like a human being. Leonardo da Vinci designed a humanoid robot in fourteen sixty four. Da Vinci's robot was called the Mechanical Night, and it could move its arms, sit, and stand independently. Robotic inventions reached a relative peak in the seventeen hundreds. Countless ingenious automata, which is a moving mechanical device meant to imitate humans, were created during this period. The nineteenth century was also filled with new robotic creations, such as a talking doll by Edison and a steam powered robot by Canadians. All these inventions made for wonderful inspiration for what would come in the twentieth century. Electro was the name of the first speaking humanoid robot in nineteen thirty nine. Electro was built by Westinghouse and was programmed to speak seven hundred words. It was seven feet tall and could perform simple tasks such as blowing up balloons. The earliest modern robots as we know them were created by George C. Devil, an inventor from Kentucky, USA. He invented and patented the reprogrammable machine called Unimate. The first industrial robot was introduced in nineteen sixty one. It was created by George Duval and Joseph Engelberger to weld autobodies in an assembly line at a General Motors plant. Engelberger is known as the father of robotics. In nineteen fifty eight, at the Stratford Research Institute, Charles Rosen led a research team in developing the first mobile and perceptive or observant robot called Shaky Shakey was designed to carry out, planning, route finding, and rearranging simple objects. Shakey was also referred to as the first electronic person. How many different kinds of robots are there? Imagine a future in which human like machines live a among us. These robotic people would walk, talk, and think. They might sit beside you in the classroom, serve you lunch in the cafeteria, or drive the school bus that takes you home each day. Today, there are many different types of robots based on their purpose and function. These include industrial robots, home robots, medical robots, service robots, entertainment robots, and space robots. The main purpose of industrial robots is to use them to make things in a factory. Some load, move, and unload materials. Others are used on assembly lines to help build things such as cars and appliances. Home robots are used mainly at your home. They vacuum, sweep, and clean. No robots can make toast yet. Medical robots are used in hospitals and other places that give medical care. Highly specialized surgeons operate robots in surgery to perform surgeries where the human hand cannot access or reach. Service robots are used to perform a variety of tasks like data gathering, research work, technology demonstrations, and more. Entertainment. Robots perform a lot of fun tasks, from toys to motion simulators. Many robots fall into this category. Space robots are designed to be used on the International Space Station and in other space missions. NASA has sent five robotic vehicles to the planet Mars. These robots are called rovers and they were named Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, curiosity, and perseverance. Are robots smarter than humans? Some scientists, like Ray Kurtzweil, predict that robots will be smarter than humans by twenty forty five. Others say it will take hundreds of years before robots become smarter than humans, and still other scientists predict that robots will be a billion times than humans, which seems like a pretty big prediction. The problem scientists have is that while we know a lot about human brains, we do not know enough to design a robot that has a brain as complex as ours. Similar to our brains, robots have a computer inside their body to do the thinking for them. These computers are not as complex as a human brain. However, computers are powerful and they can do things better than humans. Computers have many advantages over humans. They don't get tired, they can keep doing difficult and mundane tasks, they are fast, and they have enormous memories. Computers can outperform humans on certain specialized tasks, but experts agree that humans are still feel much better than computers and robots in general intelligence, creativity, and common sense knowledge or understanding of the world fun facts well bought. Two of Waseda University in Japan can read music and play an electric organ using its hands and feet. About half of all the robots in the world are in Asia, and thirty percent of all the robots are in Japan. Vacuum robots are now the most popular type of household robot. There are over two million industrial robots currently in use in the world. Robots are used in space to help explore and perform tasks that human explorers would not be able to do. Robots are used because they can survive for long periods in the harsh environments of space. The world's smallest flying robot is the robobe An Autonomous Flying microbot. These tiny robots were invented by the Wise Institute at Harvard to be used in agriculture or disaster relief. Japan has a booming nursing care robot market. Since Japan is expected to have forty percent of its population above the age of sixty five by twenty sixty five, the country is investing in medical care tech, including robots. South Korea is the first country to be drafting robot laws. Although these laws have not been constitutionalized, certain laws, such as the cyber Law, lay down some rules for ethics in robotics. We covered a lot in this episode. We learned that we can describe robots as having three major parts, a part that senses, a part that plans, and a part that acts. We also learned three Laws of robotics, a set of rules about robots found in science fiction books. These three laws don't actually exist, and no technology yet created can understand or follow them, but they may underscore our fear of robots in general. Do you remember remember what the word robot means? It's not so positive. It's taken from the check word roboto, which translates roughly to forced labor or drudgery. We also learned about the history of robots and the various kinds of robots in use today. I'll leave you with a couple of questions to think about what we introduced throughout this episode. Do you think robots are cool or scary? And what kind of robots would you like to have in your house. I'd like to say thank you to Jonah and Xander. We hope to have a chance to use your ideas in future episodes. If you'd like to send us your questions, please send them to Hello at sleep tightscience dot com. The