Body
The body of a robot is sometimes humanoid but frequently not at all.
The aim of constructing a robot has primarily been to create a functional
"complement" to humans and their needs, and that usually necessitates a
human-like structure with appendages that grasp or optical sensors that
can "see". But fundamentally a robot needs only the proper structure
to handle the tasks it is built for, and while miniaturization techniques
continue to improve, robot builders are developing newer, smaller, and
more versatile designs.
Sensing Capabilities
Unlike computers which simply follow a set of directions, robots are expected
to sense their environment, gather information about it, and to change
their behavior in accordance with the information they process. Many
different kinds of sensors have been developed. The first type of
sensors are ones that robots share with humans, or the five senses (hearing,
sight, smell, taste, touch). Aural sensors can detect the faintest
sounds, and light sensors are also highly developed. Some specialized
robots can detect the presence of water and other liquids, some have thermovisual
scanners, and still others are equipped with ultrasonic senses. Touching
sensors can determine the difference between hard and soft, and gripping
mechanisms are used in a variety of areas, from toxic sites to the space
shuttle.
The other
type of sensors are those that measure sensations beyond human recognition.
Some robots can measure higher and lower pitched hearing, while others
being developed may detect x-rays, gamma rays, infrared light, radar, and
radio waves.
Perceptive Capabilities
Perceiving the surrounding environment is a field that artificial intelligence
researchers call pattern recognition. The problem is thus: A robot
can sense its environment reasonably well, recognizing where objects are
and how to avoid them. But when a robot is asked to perceive what
it is seeing and if it has seen this object before, the task becomes
much more difficult. The main idea of perception is the filtering
process. For example, 600 trillion light rays strike the human eye
every second. Some of these rays clump together to form a chair or
a lamp, and we perceive these objects as independent of the surrounding
environment. Robots have difficulty filtering these light rays into
separate objects, and even when they are successful in this respect, perceiving
them is more of a problem. How can a robot know that a bean-bag chair
and a bar-stool, two visually dissimilar objects, are both used for sitting?
Memory Capabilities
Memory today is reasonably cheap and efficient. Robots need a good
quantity of memory to store their directions and to access previously collected
information. In 1986, Derek Kelly hypothesized that "a really general-purpose
robot is probably going to need at least 3000 megabytes of memory to be
able to talk, understand, see, hear, perceive, and act intelligently."
In retrospect, the most advanced robots twelve years ago used only three
megabytes of memory. Todayís home computers have 6-12 gigabytes of
memory. So memory is probably not a problem. But questions
remain: will we store every possible procedure for every function a robot
would ever be asked to perform? Or do we develop general procedures
and a system for applying them to specific situations? Do we store
the entire dictionary, or perhaps a dictionary for every language?
Rule Intelligence
Computers are built to follow rule intelligence like no other. They
take rules given to them and follow the rules repeatedly in an organized,
direct fashion. Parallel processing has created computers that act
more like a human brain when performing computations. But do we want
robots to have brains similar to ours, or is a direct approach better suited?
Robotís should follow the same rules consistently, but are Asimovís rules
the ones to follow?
Creative Intelligence
To make robots more human, or to have a robot follow its own directions
(that it was not directly fed), the robot must have creative intelligence,
or what one author calls "the ability to break the rules." For a
robot to be competent in the area of creative intelligence, it should be
able to take data and information of any kind and hypothesize about it,
relate it schematically, carry out permutations of the data, create combinations,
aggregate the data in different ways, or correlate the data. This
capability is far-fetched for a computer to acquire, for it would mean
the computer could ponder random thoughts or play with words in the form
of puns.
Emotions
Although in most science fiction realms bad things happen when robots acquire
emotions, research is being done on the subject of mechanical emotions
and robotic emotional capabilities. We could someday have robots
that get agitated, excited, passionate, sensitive, or that have "gut" reactions.
The thought of a touchy or agitated robot frightens most, so it is our
tendency to claim "robots canít have emotions", but that remains to be
seen.
Feelings
Similar situation, similar consequences. A robot that feels can appreciate
the significance of events, but is also susceptible to failures and breakdowns.
But what about love?...
Imagination
To be imaginative is to turn inward for inspiration in oneís actions, to
go beyond what is actual and what is possible (from a human perspective).
We as humans cannot understand human conscious capacities , so it is unlikely
that we can mechanize them.
Intuition
Intuition is another of humanityís capacities that no one truly understands.
But if imagination, feeling, and emotion are feasible to some, intuition
must be also.