Embeded Systems & Robotics

In the day-to-day life we come across a wide variety of consumer electronic products. We are habituated to use them easily and flawlessly to our advantage. Common examples are TV Remote Controllers, iPods, Mobile Phones, FAX machines, Xerox machines etc.
However, we seldom ponder over the technology behind each of them. Each of these devices does have one or more programmable devices waiting to interact with the environment as effectively as possible. These are a class of “embedded systems” and they provide service in real time. i.e. we need not have to wait too long for the action.

These embedded systems are often seen as the future of our world, Embedded means something inbuilt, like some artificial intelligence in a programmed helicopter. There are several instances where humans tend to err, while machines excel to do that work perfectly.

So, we’ll see how all these embedded systems is related to robotics. How a RTOS(REAL TIME OPERATING SYSTEM) programmed robot, finds its way on the rough surface of Moon. For a robot to make acquainted about the surroundings we require sensors, these sensors are like sense organs to the robot, it can see, hear or even feel the temperature.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica a robot is “any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner”.

Isaac Asimov was the person who popularized the term robotics. Asimov was a author, a visionary who envisioned in the 1930’s the positronic brain for controlling robots. He invented the three laws of robotics. The rules are introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround”, although they were foreshadowed in a few earlier stories. The Three Laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.