An autonomous robot is a

robot A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be c ...

that acts without recourse to human control. The first autonomous robots environment were known as

Elmer and Elsie ''Elmer and Elsie'' is a 1934 American comedy film directed by Gilbert Pratt and written by Humphrey Pearson. The film stars George Bancroft, Frances Fuller, Roscoe Karns, George Barbier, Nella Walker and Charles Sellon. The film was released on ...

, which were constructed in the late 1940s by

W. Grey Walter William Grey Walter (February 19, 1910 – May 6, 1977) was an American-born British neurophysiologist, cybernetician and robotician. Early life and education Walter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on 19 February 1910, the on ...

. They were the first

robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...

in history that were programmed to "think" the way biological brains do and meant to have free will.Ingalis-Arkell, Esthe
"The Very First Robot Brains Were Made of Old Alarm Clocks"
7 March 2012. Elmer and Elsie were often labeled as tortoises because of how they were shaped and the manner in which they moved. They were capable of

phototaxis Phototaxis is a kind of taxis, or locomotory movement, that occurs when a whole organism moves towards or away from a stimulus of light. This is advantageous for phototrophic organisms as they can orient themselves most efficiently to receive li ...

which is the movement that occurs in response to light stimulus. Historic examples include

space probes Space is the boundless three-dimensional extent in which objects and events have relative position and direction. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually conside ...

. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and

cars A car or automobile is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of ''cars'' say that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people instead of goods. The year 1886 is regarded as t ...

. Industrial robot arms that work on assembly lines inside factories may also be considered autonomous robots, though their

autonomy In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy, from , ''autonomos'', from αὐτο- ''auto-'' "self" and νόμος ''nomos'', "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's ...

is restricted due to a highly structured environment and their inability to locomote.

Components and criteria of robotic autonomy

Self-maintenance

The first requirement for complete physical autonomy is the ability for a robot to take care of itself. Many of the battery-powered robots on the market today can find and connect to a charging station, and some toys like Sony's ''

Aibo AIBO (''stylized aibo, Artificial Intelligence Robot'', homonymous with , "pal" or "partner" in Japanese) is a series of robotic dogs designed and manufactured by Sony. Sony announced a prototype Aibo in mid-1998, and the first consumer model wa ...

'' are capable of self-docking to charge their batteries. Self-maintenance is based on "

proprioception Proprioception ( ), also referred to as kinaesthesia (or kinesthesia), is the sense of self-movement, force, and body position. It is sometimes described as the "sixth sense". Proprioception is mediated by proprioceptors, mechanosensory neurons ...

", or sensing one's own internal status. In the battery charging example, the robot can tell proprioceptively that its batteries are low and it then seeks the charger. Another common proprioceptive sensor is for heat monitoring. Increased proprioception will be required for robots to work autonomously near people and in harsh environments. Common proprioceptive sensors include thermal, optical, and haptic sensing, as well as the

Hall effect The Hall effect is the production of a voltage difference (the Hall voltage) across an electrical conductor that is transverse to an electric current in the conductor and to an applied magnetic field perpendicular to the current. It was disco ...

(electric).

Sensing the environment

Exteroception is sensing things about the environment. Autonomous robots must have a range of environmental sensors to perform their task and stay out of trouble. The autonomous robot can recognize sensor failures and minimize the impact on the performance caused by failures. *Common exteroceptive sensors include the

electromagnetic spectrum The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of frequencies (the spectrum) of electromagnetic radiation and their respective wavelengths and photon energies. The electromagnetic spectrum covers electromagnetic waves with frequencies ranging from ...

sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...

, touch, chemical (smell,

odor An odor (American English) or odour (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English; American and British English spelling differences#-our, -or, see spelling differences) is caused by one or more volatilized chemical compounds ...

), temperature, range to various objects, and

altitude Altitude or height (also sometimes known as depth) is a distance measurement, usually in the vertical or "up" direction, between a reference datum and a point or object. The exact definition and reference datum varies according to the context ...

. Some robotic lawn mowers will adapt their programming by detecting the speed in which grass grows as needed to maintain a perfectly cut lawn, and some vacuum cleaning robots have dirt detectors that sense how much dirt is being picked up and use this information to tell them to stay in one area longer.

Task performance

The next step in autonomous behavior is to actually perform a physical task. A new area showing commercial promise is domestic robots, with a flood of small vacuuming robots beginning with

iRobot iRobot Corporation is an American technology company that designs and builds consumer robots. It was founded in 1990 by three members of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, who designed robots for space exploration and military defense. The com ...

and

Electrolux Electrolux AB () is a Swedish multinational home appliance manufacturer, headquartered in Stockholm. It is consistently ranked the world's second largest appliance maker by units sold, after Whirlpool. Electrolux products sell under a variety ...

in 2002. While the level of intelligence is not high in these systems, they navigate over wide areas and pilot in tight situations around homes using contact and non-contact sensors. Both of these robots use proprietary algorithms to increase coverage over simple random bounce. The next level of autonomous task performance requires a robot to perform conditional tasks. For instance, security robots can be programmed to detect intruders and respond in a particular way depending upon where the intruder is. For example,

Amazon (company) Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

launched its Astro for home monitoring, security and eldercare in September 2021.

Autonomous navigation

Indoor navigation

For a robot to associate behaviors with a place (

localization Localization or localisation may refer to: Biology * Localization of function, locating psychological functions in the brain or nervous system; see Linguistic intelligence * Localization of sensation, ability to tell what part of the body is a ...

) requires it to know where it is and to be able to navigate point-to-point. Such navigation began with wire-guidance in the 1970s and progressed in the early 2000s to beacon-based

triangulation In trigonometry and geometry, triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by forming triangles to the point from known points. Applications In surveying Specifically in surveying, triangulation involves only angle me ...

. Current commercial robots autonomously navigate based on sensing natural features. The first commercial robots to achieve this were Pyxus' HelpMate hospital robot and the CyberMotion guard robot, both designed by robotics pioneers in the 1980s. These robots originally used manually created

CAD Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computers (or ) to aid in the creation, modification, analysis, or optimization of a design. This software is used to increase the productivity of the designer, improve the quality of design, improve co ...

floor plans, sonar sensing and wall-following variations to navigate buildings. The next generation, such as MobileRobots'

PatrolBot PatrolBot is a programmable autonomous general purpose service robot rover built by MobileRobots Inc. PatrolBots are manufactured in various configurations and serve as bases for companies developing delivery robots, security robots, environment ...

and autonomous wheelchair, both introduced in 2004, have the ability to create their own laser-based maps of a building and to navigate open areas as well as corridors. Their control system changes its path on the fly if something blocks the way. At first, autonomous navigation was based on planar sensors, such as laser range-finders, that can only sense at one level. The most advanced systems now fuse information from various sensors for both localization (position) and navigation. Systems such as Motivity can rely on different sensors in different areas, depending upon which provides the most reliable data at the time, and can re-map a building autonomously. Rather than climb stairs, which requires highly specialized hardware, most indoor robots navigate handicapped-accessible areas, controlling elevators, and electronic doors. With such electronic access-control interfaces, robots can now freely navigate indoors. Autonomously climbing stairs and opening doors manually are topics of research at the current time. As these indoor techniques continue to develop, vacuuming robots will gain the ability to clean a specific user-specified room or a whole floor. Security robots will be able to cooperatively surround intruders and cut off exits. These advances also bring concomitant protections: robots' internal maps typically permit "forbidden areas" to be defined to prevent robots from autonomously entering certain regions.

Outdoor navigation

Outdoor autonomy is most easily achieved in the air, since obstacles are rare.

Cruise missile A cruise missile is a guided missile used against terrestrial or naval targets that remains in the atmosphere and flies the major portion of its flight path at approximately constant speed. Cruise missiles are designed to deliver a large warhe ...

s are rather dangerous highly autonomous robots. Pilotless drone aircraft are increasingly used for reconnaissance. Some of these

unmanned aerial vehicle An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controller ...

s (UAVs) are capable of flying their entire mission without any human interaction at all except possibly for the landing where a person intervenes using radio remote control. Some drones are capable of safe, automatic landings, however.

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and a satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal of ...

operates a number of

Autonomous spaceport drone ship An autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) is an ocean-going vessel derived from a deck barge, outfitted with station-keeping engines and a large landing platform and is autonomously controlled when on station for a landing. Construction of ...

s, used to safely land and recover

Falcon 9 Falcon 9 is a partially reusable medium lift launch vehicle that can carry cargo and crew into Earth orbit, produced by American aerospace company SpaceX. The rocket has two stages. The first (booster) stage carries the second stage and payl ...

rockets at sea. Outdoor autonomy is the most difficult for ground vehicles, due to: * Three-dimensional terrain * Great disparities in surface density * Weather exigencies * Instability of the sensed environment

Open problems in autonomous robotics

There are several open problems in autonomous robotics which are special to the field rather than being a part of the general pursuit of AI. According to George A. Bekey's ''Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Implementation and Control'', problems include things such as making sure the robot is able to function correctly and not run into obstacles autonomously. Reinforcement learning has been used to control and plan the navigation of autonomous robots, specifically when a group of them operate in collaboration with each other. ;Energy autonomy and foraging Researchers concerned with creating true

artificial life Artificial life (often abbreviated ALife or A-Life) is a field of study wherein researchers examine systems related to natural life, its processes, and its evolution, through the use of simulations with computer models, robotics, and biochemistry ...

are concerned not only with intelligent control, but further with the capacity of the robot to find its own resources through

foraging Foraging is searching for wild food resources. It affects an animal's Fitness (biology), fitness because it plays an important role in an animal's ability to survive and reproduce. Optimal foraging theory, Foraging theory is a branch of behaviora ...

(looking for

food Food is any substance consumed by an organism for nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is inge ...

, which includes both

energy In physics, energy (from Ancient Greek: ἐνέργεια, ''enérgeia'', “activity”) is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of work and in the form of heat a ...

and spare parts). This is related to autonomous foraging, a concern within the

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

s of

behavioral ecology Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when ...

social anthropology Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...

, and human behavioral ecology; as well as

ics,

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

, and

Societal impact and issues

As autonomous robots have grown in ability and technical levels, there has been increasing societal awareness and news coverage of the latest advances, and also some of the philosophical issues, economic effects, and societal impacts that arise from the roles and activities of autonomous robots. Elon Musk, a prominent business executive and billionaire has warned for years of the possible hazards and pitfalls of autonomous robots; however his own company is one of the most prominent companies that is trying to devise new advanced technologies in this area. In 2021, a United Nations group of government experts, known as the ''Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons – Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems,'' held a conference to highlight the ethical concerns which arise from the increasingly advanced technology for autonomous robots to wield weapons and to play a military role.

Technical development

Space probes

The Mars rovers

MER-A ''Spirit'', also known as MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover – A) or MER-2, is a Mars robotic rover, active from 2004 to 2010. ''Spirit'' was operational on Mars for sols or 3.3 Martian years ( days; '). It was one of two rovers of NASA's Mar ...

and

MER-B ''Opportunity'', also known as MER-B (Mars Exploration Rover – B) or MER-1, is a Robotics, robotic rover (space exploration), rover that was active on Mars from 2004 until 2018. ''Opportunity'' was operational on Mars for Timekeeping on Mar ...

(now known as ''Spirit'' rover and ''Opportunity'' rover) found the position of the Sun and navigated their own routes to destinations, on the fly, by: * Mapping the surface with 3D vision * Computing safe and unsafe areas on the surface within that field of vision * Computing optimal paths across the safe area towards the desired destination * Driving along the calculated route; * Repeating this cycle until either the destination is reached, or there is no known path to the destination The planned

ESA , owners = , headquarters = Paris, Île-de-France, France , coordinates = , spaceport = Guiana Space Centre , seal = File:ESA emblem seal.png , seal_size = 130px , image = Views in the Main Control Room (120 ...

Rover, ''Rosalind Franklin'' rover, is capable of vision based relative localisation and absolute localisation to autonomously navigate safe and efficient trajectories to targets by: * Reconstructing 3D models of the terrain surrounding the Rover using a pair of stereo cameras * Determining safe and unsafe areas of the terrain and the general "difficulty" for the Rover to navigate the terrain * Computing efficient paths across the safe area towards the desired destination * Driving the Rover along the planned path * Building up a navigation map of all previous navigation data During the final NASA Sample Return Robot Centennial Challenge in 2016, a rover, named Cataglyphis, successfully demonstrated fully autonomous navigation, decision-making, and sample detection, retrieval, and return capabilities. The rover relied on a fusion of measurements from

inertial sensor An inertial measurement unit (IMU) is an electronic device that measures and reports a body's specific force, angular rate, and sometimes the orientation of the body, using a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and sometimes magnetomete ...

s, wheel encoders, Lidar, and camera for navigation and mapping, instead of using GPS or magnetometers. During the 2 hour challenge, Cataglyphis traversed over 2.6 km and returned five different samples to its starting position.

General-use autonomous robots

The Seekur robot was the first commercially available robot to demonstrate MDARS-like capabilities for general use by airports, utility plants, corrections facilities and

Homeland Security Homeland security is an American national security term for "the national effort to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards where American interests, aspirations, and ways of life can thrive" t ...

. The

DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...

and

DARPA Urban Challenge The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was commonly known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. It took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Logist ...

have encouraged development of even more autonomous capabilities for ground vehicles, while this has been the demonstrated goal for aerial robots since 1990 as part of the AUVSI

International Aerial Robotics Competition The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) began in 1991 on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology and is the longest running university-based robotics competition in the world. Since 1991, collegiate teams with the backing ...

. Between 2013 and 2017,

TotalEnergies TotalEnergies SE is a French Multinational corporation, multinational integrated energy and List of oil exploration and production companies, petroleum company founded in 1924 and one of the seven Big Oil, supermajor oil companies. Its businesses ...

has held the

ARGOS Challenge The ARGOS Challenge was a robotic competition sponsored by Total between 2013 and 2017 and co-organized with Agence nationale de la recherche. The acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or ...

to develop the first autonomous robot for oil and gas production sites. The robots had to face adverse outdoor conditions such as rain, wind and extreme temperatures. Some significant current robots include: * Sophia is an autonomous robot that is known for its human-like appearance and behavior compared to previous robotic variants. As of 2018, Sophia's architecture includes scripting software, a chat system, and

OpenCog OpenCog is a project that aims to build an open source software, open source artificial intelligence framework. OpenCog Prime is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to giv ...

, an AI system designed for general reasoning. Sophia imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversations on predefined topics (e.g. on the weather). Sophia uses

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

technology from

Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and sev ...

(the parent company of

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

) and is "designed to get smarter over time". The AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows it to improve responses in the future. * Nine other robot humanoid "siblings" who were also created by

Hanson Robotics Hanson Robotics Limited is a Hong Kong-based engineering and robotics company founded by David Hanson, known for its development of human-like robots with artificial intelligence (AI) for consumer, entertainment, service, healthcare, and researc ...

. Fellow Hanson robots are Alice, Albert Einstein Hubo,

BINA48 BINA48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture 48*) is a robotic face combined with the chatbot functionalities, enabling simple conversation facilities similar to chatbots. BINA48 is owned by Martine Rothblatt's Terasem Movement. It wa ...

, Han, Jules, Professor Einstein, Philip K. Dick Android, Zeno, and Joey Chaos. Around 2019–20, Hanson released "Little Sophia" as a companion that could teach children how to code, including support for Python, Blockly, and Raspberry Pi.

Military autonomous robots

Lethal autonomous weapon Lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) are a type of autonomous military system that can independently search for and engage targets based on programmed constraints and descriptions. LAWs are also known as lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), auto ...

s (LAWs) are a type of autonomous robot military system that can independently search for and engage targets based on programmed constraints and descriptions. LAWs are also known as lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), autonomous weapon systems (AWS), robotic weapons, killer robots or slaughterbots. LAWs may operate in the air, on land, on water, under water, or in space. The autonomy of current systems was restricted in the sense that a human gives the final command to attack - though there are exceptions with certain "defensive" systems. *UGV Interoperability Profile (UGV IOP), Robotics and Autonomous Systems – Ground IOP (RAS-G IOP), was originally a research program started by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) to organize and maintain

open architecture Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components with other computers easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 500 and Apple IIe have an open architecture support ...

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...

standards for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). The IOP was initially created by U.S. Army Robotic Systems Joint Project Office (RS JPO): * In October 2019, Textron and Howe & Howe unveiled their

Ripsaw A ripsaw (or rip saw) is a wood saw that is specially designed for making a rip cut, a cut made parallel to the direction of the wood grain. Design The cutting edge of each tooth has a flat front edge and it is angled backward by about 8°, in ...

M5 vehicle, and on 9 January 2020, the U.S. Army awarded them a contract for the Robotic Combat Vehicle-Medium (RCV-M) program. Four Ripsaw M5 prototypes are to be delivered and used in a

company A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of people, whether Natural person, natural, Legal person, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common p ...

-level to determine the feasibility of integrating unmanned vehicles into ground combat operations in late 2021. It can reach speeds of more than , has a combat weight of 10.5 tons and a payload capacity of . The RCV-M is armed with a 30 mm autocannon and a pair of

anti-tank missile An anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), anti-tank missile, anti-tank guided weapon (ATGW) or anti-armor guided weapon is a Missile guidance, guided missile primarily designed to hit and destroy Armoured fighting vehicle, heavily armored military v ...

s. The standard armor package can withstand 12.7×108mm rounds, with optional add-on armor increasing weight to up to 20 tons. If disabled, it will retain the ability to shoot, with its sensors and radio uplink prioritized to continue transmitting as its primary function. * Crusher is a

autonomous In developmental psychology and moral, political, and bioethical philosophy, autonomy, from , ''autonomos'', from αὐτο- ''auto-'' "self" and νόμος ''nomos'', "law", hence when combined understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's ow ...

off-road

Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle An unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is a vehicle that operates while in contact with the ground and without an onboard human presence. UGVs can be used for many applications where it may be inconvenient, dangerous, or impossible to have a human op ...

developed by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center for

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

. It is a follow up on the previous Spinner vehicle. DARPA's technical name for the Crusher is ''Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle and Perceptor Integration System'', and the whole project is known by the acronym UPI, which stands for ''Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle PerceptOR Integration''. * CATS Warrior will be an autonomous wingman drone capable of take off & landing from land & in sea from an

aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. Typically, it is the capital ship of a fleet, as it allows a ...

, it will team up with the existing fighter platforms of the IAF like Tejas, Su-30 MKI and

Jaguar The jaguar (''Panthera onca'') is a large cat species and the only living member of the genus '' Panthera'' native to the Americas. With a body length of up to and a weight of up to , it is the largest cat species in the Americas and the th ...

which will act like its mothership. * The Warrior is primarily envisioned for the Indian Air Force use and a similar, smaller version will be designed for the

Indian Navy The Indian Navy is the maritime branch of the Indian Armed Forces. The President of India is the Supreme Commander of the Indian Navy. The Chief of Naval Staff, a four-star admiral, commands the navy. As a blue-water navy, it operates sig ...

. It would be controlled by the mothership and accomplish tasks such as scouting, absorbing enemy fire, attacking the targets if necessary with its internal & external pylons weapons or sacrifice itself by crashing into the target. * The SGR-A1 is a type of autonomous

sentry gun A sentry gun is a weapon that is automatically aimed and fired at targets that are detected by sensors. The earliest functioning military sentry guns were the close-in weapon systems point-defense weapons, such as the Phalanx CIWS, used for det ...

that was jointly developed by

Samsung Techwin Hanwha Techwin (), founded as Samsung Techwin, is a video surveillance company. It is a subsidiary of Hanwha Group. The company employs 1,822 people and is headquartered in South Korea. Its total sales in 2020 were 529.8 billion South Korean won ...

(now

Hanwha Aerospace , type = Public , traded_as = , industry = Aerospace , genre = , fate = , predecessor = , successor = , founded = (as Samsung Precision) ...

) and Korea University to assist South Korean troops in the

Korean Demilitarized Zone The Korean Demilitarized Zone (Korean: ; Hanbando Bimujang Jidae) is a strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula near the 38th parallel north. The demilitarized zone (DMZ) is a border barrier that divides the peninsula roughly in ha ...

. It is widely considered as the first unit of its kind to have an integrated system that includes surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition. While units of the SGR-A1 have been reportedly deployed, their number is unknown due to the project being "highly classified".

Types of robots

Delivery robot

A delivery robot is an autonomous robot used for delivering goods.

Charging Robot

An Automatic Charging Robot, unveiled on July 27, 2022, is an arm-shaped automatic charging robot, charging an electric vehicle. It has been running a pilot operation at Hyundai Motor Group's headquarters since 2021. VISION AI System based on deep learning technology has been applied. When an electric vehicle is parked in front of the charger, the robot arm recognizes the charger of the electric vehicle and derives coordinates. And automatically insert a connector into the electric car and operate fast charging. The robot arm is configured in a vertical multi-joint structure so that it can be applied to chargers at different locations for each vehicle. In addition, waterproof and dustproof functions are applied.

Construction robots

Construction robots are used directly on job sites and perform work such as building, material handling, earthmoving, and surveillance. Numerous companies have robotics applications in stages ranging from R&D to fully-commercialized. * ASI Robots: heavy equipment automation and autonomy platform * Builder heavy equipment automation * Built Robotics: heavy equipment automation * Doxel: autonomous surveillance and job site tracking * EquipmentShare: equipment automation and remote control * Fastbrick Robotics: bricklaying robot * Jaybridge Robotics: heavy equipment automation * Robo Industries: heavy equipment automation * SafeAI: heavy equipment automation * Scaled Robotics: autonomous surveillance and job site tracking * Semcon: autonomous compactors and plows * Steer: remote control operation *

Zoomlion Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology Co., Ltd. is a Chinese construction machinery and agricultural machinery manufacturer. Road Machinery Zoomlion Official Site pile foundation rotary drilling rigs, road rollers, snowplows, street swee ...

: heavy equipment automation

Research and education mobile robots

Research and education mobile robots are mainly used during a prototyping phase in the process of building full scale robots. They are a scaled down versions of bigger robots with the same types of sensors,

kinematics Kinematics is a subfield of physics, developed in classical mechanics, that describes the Motion (physics), motion of points, Physical object, bodies (objects), and systems of bodies (groups of objects) without considering the forces that cause ...

and software stack (e.g. ROS). They are often extendable and provide comfortable programming interface and development tools. Next to full scale robot prototyping they are also used for education, especially at university level, where more and more labs about programming autonomous vehicles are being introduced. Some of the popular research and education robots are: * TurtleBot * ROSbot 2.0

Legislation

In March 2016, a bill was introduced in Washington, D.C., allowing pilot ground robotic deliveries. The program was to take place from September 15 through the end of December 2017. The robots were limited to a weight of 50 pounds unloaded and a maximum speed of 10 miles per hour. In case the robot stopped moving because of malfunction the company was required to remove it from the streets within 24 hours. There were allowed only 5 robots to be tested per company at a time. A 2017 version of the Personal Delivery Device Act bill was under review as of March 2017. In February 2017, a bill was passed in the US state of

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...

via the House bill, HB2016, and the Senate bill, SB1207, that will allow autonomous delivery robots to travel on sidewalks and use crosswalks statewide beginning on July 1, 2017. The robots will be limited to a maximum speed of 10 mph and a maximum weight of 50 pounds. In the states of Idaho and Florida there are also talks about passing the similar legislature. It has been discussed that robots with similar characteristics to invalid carriages (e.g. 10 mph maximum, limited battery life) might be a workaround for certain classes of applications. If the robot was sufficiently intelligent and able to recharge itself using the existing electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure it would only need minimal supervision and a single arm with low dexterity might be enough to enable this function if its visual systems had enough resolution. In November 2017, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors announced that companies would need to get a city permit in order to test these robots. In addition, sidewalk delivery robots have been banned from making non-research deliveries.

References

External links

{{Authority control - Uncrewed vehicles Self-replication

Components and criteria of robotic autonomy

Self-maintenance

Sensing the environment

Task performance

Autonomous navigation

Indoor navigation

Outdoor navigation

Open problems in autonomous robotics

Societal impact and issues

Technical development

Space probes

General-use autonomous robots

Military autonomous robots

Types of robots

Delivery robot

Charging Robot

Construction robots

Research and education mobile robots

Legislation

See also

Scientific concepts

Types of robots

Specific robot models

References

External links