1: Introduction

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Robotics celebrated its 50th birthday in 2011, dating back to the first commercial robot in 1961 (the Unimate). In a “Tonight Show” from the time, this robot did amazing things: it opens a bottle of beer, pours it, puts a golf ball into the hole, and even conducts an orchestra. This robot does all what we expect a good robot to do: it is dexterous, it is accurate, and even creative. Since this robot’s appearance on the Tonight show, more than 50 years have passed — so how incredible must be the capabilities of today’s robots and what must they be able to do?

Interestingly, we just recently learned doing all the things demonstrated by Unimate autonomously. Unimate indeed did what was shown on TV, but all motions have been preprogrammed and the environment has been carefully staged. Only the advent of cheap and powerful sensors and computation has recently enabled robots to detect an object by themselves, plan motions to it and grasp it. Yet, robotics is still far away from doing these tasks with human-like performance.

This book introduces you to the computational fundamentals of autonomous robots. Robots are autonomous when they make decisions in response to their environment vs. simply following a pre-programmed set of motions. They achieve this using techniques from signal processing, control theory, and artificial intelligence, among others. These techniques are coupled with the mechanics, the sensors, and the actuators of the robot. Designing a robot therefore requires a deep understanding of both algorithms and its interfaces to the physical world.

The goals of this introductory chapter are to introduce the kind of problems roboticists deal with and how they solve it.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): A wind-up toy that does not fall off the table using purely mechanical control. A fly-wheel that turns orthogonal to the robot’s motion induces a right turn as soon as it hits the ground once the front caster wheel goes off the edge.