History Robot Technology For Military And Civil

Robots are programmable physical machines that have sensors and actuators, and are given goals for what they should achieve in the world. Perception algorithms process the sensor inputs, a control program decides how the robot should behave given its goals and current circumstances, and commands are sent to the motors to make the robot act in the world. Some robots are mobile, but others are rooted to a fixed location.

Robots in plays and movies (a 1920 Czech play was where the word “robot” originated) have generally been much more capable that actual contemporary robots. The first deployed robots were in structured environments such as automobile assembly lines in the 1950’s. At that time, computation and sensors were both very expensive, so the environments for robots were specially constructed so that robots could effectively operate with little sensing or computation. Today’s manufacturing robots still follow this approach and so manufacturing robots are only used in industries where the overhead of building the necessary special environments can be absorbed. This restricts them to factories that produce very expensive objects such as automobiles or silicon wafers, or very high volumes of unchanging products over many years, such as disposable medical devices.

Since the 1970’s, most research in robotics has been targeted at extending robot capabilities to unstructured environments environments not prepared specially for them. Early attempts concentrated on navigation, both indoors and outdoors, and the 1997 Mars rover Sojourner was the first major deployed success. Ground robots have, since 2002, become common in the US military, tackling the problems of forward scouting and IED remediation in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Great further progress has been made with the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge where several robot vehicles autonomously drove 200 kilometers across a desert, and in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge where a number of vehicles autonomously drove in traffic in a town for six hours. Concurrently, the first service robots have become common, with several million autonomous cleaning robots deployed in ordinary US households. But there is a lot more that robots are capable of, and many more research challenges beyond navigation that will enable these new capabilities.

Why we need robots
Demographic trends in the US and worldwide demand the increased utilization of robots. These trends point not only to the problem of who will fund social security as the ratio of older and largely retired people to younger working people increases, but worse, those social security dollars will be competing for the service labor of relatively fewer people. Other countries will be competing for immigrants to fill labor pools (the tip of the iceberg is the current world‐wide competition for emigrating medical professionals from the Philippines). The US will face profound challenges in populating its military, in providing construction labor, in nursing and elder‐care, in fire fighting and emergency services, in all aspects of service industries, and in manufacturing. Robots will be a key technology to greatly increase the productivity of individual humans.