What is artificial intelligence and robots
Let's talk about artificial intelligenceand robotics, what is it exactly?
Right off the bat you're probably thinking acybernetic organism with living tissue over a metal endoskeleton... yeah. well this is just a small part of it artificial intelligence, more commonly known as AI doesn't always have to exist in a robot think about a self-drivingcar or a space probe, both of these are robots, yes robots, with varying levels of AI. and then of course you have things like Netflix or search engines but we'll get into that a little bit later. okay so thetwo terms robotics and artificial intelligence actually overlap but forthe most part they're quite separate. Now there are some variations of where theoverlap but generally this is how it goes. Let's break this diagram down starting outside with a simple machine like avacuum cleaner it has one function and one button to control it this is classed asa machine, just straightforward simple. Now to turn this into a robot you couldmake it a little smaller, add some motors so it could drive itself around and mostimportantly upload the floor plan of your home and then yes it would be classed as a robot going around the house cleaning up. But what if peoplekept moving furniture all the time or getting in the way, how could you getaround that? Well this is where the two overlap, this time you don't need toupload the floor plan.
No, instead they have built-in sensors this time round itlearns the floor plan it learns that right outside the kitchen there is a very high traffic area and probably needs the turbo mode. It even figures outthat there's a spot right under your bed that hasn't been cleaned in a very very long time. Now that's adaptive behavior that'smachine learning that's an artificially intelligent robot. Okay then what's aboutpure AI what does this look like? Well pick up your phone and ask Google to make areservation at your favorite restaurant but wait isn't this just taking a fewboxes on a website? A bit simple right? Well yeah, but levels of AI increase whenyou have a really deep accent or when it actually calls up the restaurant andspeaks to them for you. Don't believe me? Try it out yourself check out Googleduplex. But of course there are limitations, that vacuum cleaner sure is swell. But if you asked it to wash your car it would be very confused. Probably won't do anything at all. Why? Because it hasn't been told how to do this and if it did it certainly does not have the robotic components to do so. You see howall of this is fitting in together now Okay so isn't AI just making uslazier then? Isn't this a problem? No not at all. Sometimes we just can't do the things we want to do. Let me explain... When we communicate with our spacecraft we use radio waves for communication and in avacuum these waves travel at the speed of light Approximately 300,000km/sfast, I know. But actually this poses quite aproblem. The Curiosity rover was sent out to Mars in 2011 now because of these huge distances, it takes around 12 minutes or so to get any informationfrom Mars to Earth and then 12 more minutes to send the information back now this time varies a little due to orbits but can you see the problem?
So if we hada basic robot it would do as you say you would tell it to travel over to that rock you thought was interesting and then you would receive pictures of it. But that'sjust taken 12 minutes and the photos they're not great you expected somethingelse something a little better. So you tell it to travel to another rock andthere goes another 12 minutes. But what if we told curiosity what we werelooking for wouldn't this make things easier? The rover could just send databack and we could analyze it accordingly. Well this is exactly what they did in2016 after Curiosity's initial mission the engineers and scientists upgradedits AI system and it was able to do just this. You might be thinking that this isall code and algorithms it's just the computer scientists working on this andyeah they do play a big part. But what if the Curiosity rover fell on its side? Seriously what would you do 35 million miles away What you're going to writesome sort of code to flip it over? Please... So don't be disheartened that AIis coming in and doing things for us there's a tremendous amount of work tobe done still. It's a lot more than just Netflix recommendations, It's about reversing the effects of climate change, stopping tsunamis fromtheir devastating effects or even performing open-heart surgery AI and robotics can help with a lot of this .
Thanks for reading: What is artificial intelligence and robots // All about robots // robot lovers, Sorry, my English is bad:)