The first required reading on robotics was a great learning tool for me. As far as robotics go I would consider myself a rookie. I don't know much about it nor do I know how it all comes together to function. After I read this article I felt a little bit more versed in the terms of robotics. However, for the most part I still didn't understand some of the terms used. Overall, this article was a great overview of robotics. It was broken down into smaller sections to help organize topics by relativity.
The second article I chose to read was "Scientists Developing Robotic Hand of the Future". It was about researchers in Spain developing a robotic hand to imitate a human's. This article I found particularly interesting because I like to see how close we are to actually imitating humans. I liked how this article was formatted because it stated the major problems faced by the researchers. This particular project is called HANDLE and is based out Carlos III University of Madrid. The researchers at this university are trying to figure out how humans manipulate objects in order to replicate the movement and sensibility and autonomous movement. This article identifies the main problems in recreating a human hand. Some of the problems are pretty simple. One for instance is the lack of space to fit all the components and sensors inside the actual robotic hand. Another problem is the sensor market place. The researchers can't find a sensor on the market that is small enough to fit in the hand and have the appropriate sensor capabilities. The last problem they faced is integrating an intelligent system incorporate autonomous movement as well as adaptations to the environment and object specifications.
These two articles directly relate to each other. the first article explains the different systems of the robot while the second article applies them to an actual project. The robotic hand uses the sensors and intelligent systems described in the Robotics article on Access Science.
Most students said the same thing as me when it comes to the assigned article. We mostly said it was a good overview of the robotics topic in general and was a good base for follow up article.
I agree with Buzz in how the assigned reading was a great overview of robotics and was effective in how they broke it up into sections. I also agree that the article was a bit lengthy and tough to understand some of the terms used. The assigned reading also went into some detail about the robotics it takes to imitate a hand, and I found that to be interesting.
ReplyDeleteThe article about the robotic hand that Buzz read and commented on sounds very interesting. For scientists to say that they want to replicated the human hand seems basically easy but when you start thinking about it, it really is such a detailed and involved process. When we go to do something with our hand we react to so many different things such as temperature and material. Any reactions that we make are instantaneous, without even thinking. So it is understandable why the number of sensors, accuracy, and size of the sensors would all become issues when trying to create a robotic hand the same size as our own.
ReplyDelete