By Chhavi Dugal
Think..how nice it would be if you could be spared of cooking. If somebody could clean your room… if your clothes were washed without doing an effort…if you could blow your anger at someone without hurting him/her/it… also what if you were never bothered to save petrol because one day it would finish off?
It just seems that future is going to be rocking with solution to all these questions…
The solution is apparently ROBOTS…
Scientists are working on ROBOTIC projects that would aim at human help as well as environmental help. For instance, Swarmanoid is a project that uses 3 specialized classes of robots (footbots, handbots and eyebots) to create an effective swarm. Such a swarm should be able to, for example, clean a bedroom with each robot doing a specialized task. Also, Robots are increasingly used in manufacturing (since 1960s). In the auto industry they can amount for more than half of the “labour”. There are even “lights off” factories such as an IBM keyboard manufacturing factory in Texas that is 100% automated. Robots such as HOSPI are used as couriers in hospitals. Other hospital tasks performed by robots are receptionists, guides and porters helpers. Robots can also serve as waiters and cooks.
Furthermore, it is also believed that robots in future will perform in agriculture, surgeries, household work, and in army. There is no doubt that they will b able to do all manual as well as technical work. These robots are called humanoid robots. Lara is the first robot with artificial muscles instead of electric motors (2006). By 2050, there will be robot “brains” based on computers that execute 100 trillion instructions per second which will start rivaling human intelligence.
Interestingly, even extraction of petroleum is done with the help of robots. In this project, Exploration Robot is used in detecting natural gas from beneath the surface of the earth. There are two methods to detect the natural gas: manual and automatic.
In manual mode, robot is controlled by a human operator at a remote location via a communications link. Movements and actions by robot to detect the natural gas beneath the surface of the earth is controlled by the operator based upon sensory feedback from either line-of-sight visual observation or remote sensory input such as video cameras and natural gas detection methods using a software.
In automatic mode, robot gains information about the environment, work for extended durations without human intervention and travels from point A to point B and goes beneath the surface of the earth without human navigation assistance to detect the natural gas by natural gas detection methods using aurduino hardware and software. The technique uses an infrared signal to detect the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons in samples. This new technique can assist in the fast and effective identification of oil and other petroleum products in the environment in an efficient way.
By contrast, current methods use sampling and processing techniques that are labour intensive, time consuming, require sensitive equipment and are not well suited for on-site analysis.
Hence, petroleum extraction becomes easier with introduction of robots. Thus, we can say that robots are our future mothers. They will take care of children, help the elderly people, help in each and every work and hence become like our supermoms.
One can also wonder what would happen if oxygen could be produced by robots or maybe another invention could make robots capable of controlling globalization. The list to imagination and discovery is endless… No wonder a robot starts gym training or enter politics to rule the world in maybe a technological manner. Cool eh?!
