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THE EVOLUTION OF
EXPERIMENTAL ROBOTS
by Tom Carroll
Awhile back, I wrote about how e’ve built robots over the years
and also wrote about the historical
perspective of experimental robots.
But what actually drove the designs?
Why do we build what we do? What
societal influences led us to certain
designs? Certainly the development of
microprocessors. Microcontrollers had
the greatest impact in giving robot
experimenters the ability to build
robots with a lot of programmed functions and the ability to understand the
many new sensors being developed
for experimenters. But, what were the
reasons that experimenters and
hobbyists spent countless hours in
FIGURE 1.
76 SERVO 08.2009
their workshops dreaming of,
designing, and building every type of
robot one can imagine? Big robots,
small robots, intelligent robots, R/C
robots, battling robots, and even
creations that defied the definition of
a robot grew in workshops around
the world.
Joe Engelberger, the ‘Father of
Industrial Robots,’ was once quoted as
saying “I can’t define a robot, but I
know one when I see one.” Many
people still debate the definition of a
robot. It is this gray area of definition
that has allowed all of us to explore
so many directions in the creation of
the ultimate robot.
The Influence of
Isaac Asimov
Before I go into the many
changes and directions that experimental robotics has undergone, I’d
like to go over some of the literary
and cinematic influences that have
occurred to drive ideas and designs.
No writer has had more influence on
the concept of robots than sci-fi
author, Isaac Asimov. He did not
know how to build a robot, despite
the mentioning of positronic brains
and photocell eyes in his stories. He
had a Ph.D. in Chemistry, not
Engineering. The main human
character in many of his ‘I Robot’
series of short stories was Dr. Susan
Calvin, a robopsychologist. He was
very knowledgeable and psychologically
creative when it came to understanding the social interaction of robots
with people and used Calvin in his
stories to convey that message.
Starting back in 1940 with his
story about Robbie in “Strange
Playfellow,” his Three Laws of Robotics
set the stage for gentle and safe
robots to work and serve among
people. Nobody — not even Asimov —
could have imagined microprocessors
and gigabyte memories the size of a
thumbnail. Even transistors were
unheard of. However, his robots
worked well within the story lines and
we will all be eternally grateful for his
literary contributions. The recent Will
Smith film i,Robot was loosely based
on his stories, though the robots did
get a bit out of hand in the end.
Influences from
Movies
Probably the number one reason
any of us ever built a robot, was we
wanted to duplicate what we saw in
movies. It was actually Karel Capek’s
revolutionary play RUR in 1921 that
introduced the word ‘robot’ to the
public. The evil Maria from Fritz Lang’s
1927 movie classic Metropolis (shown
in Figure 1) allowed people to see
what a robot might look like as the
term robot had only been around for
a few years. Gort from the 1951 film
When the Earth Stood Still was merely
a very tall man in a silver wetsuit
of sorts — not really something
‘buildable’ from a hobbyist’s point-of-view. Later, the towering robot from
the movie Tobor the Great (robot
spelled backwards) of 1954 inspired
