Short Introduction to Robotics

Chapter 2

Short Introduction to Robotics

“I can’t define a robot, but I know one when I see one.” —Joseph Engelberger “A robot must know it is a robot” —Nikola Kesarovski, The Fifth Law of Robotics

Abstract This is a little crash course in robotics for the case you haven’t heard so much about robotics yet. This short introduction to mobile robotics is starting from a general perspective and quickly introduces fundamental concepts, such as sensors, actuators, and kinematics. We continue with a short introduction to open-loop and closed-loop control. Agent models, behavior-based robotics, and potential field control are introduced as control options particularly interesting for swarm robots. We conclude with a presentation of several hardware platforms dedicated to swarm robotics, such as the s-bot, the I-SWARM robot, Alice, and the Kilobot among others. Before we start with the actual subject of robot swarms, we have to go through some basic concepts of mobile robotics. We start with discussing what a single robot needs and at the end of the chapter we have a look at some examples of robots specifically designed for swarm robotics. Similarly to other complex issues, such as intelligence or life, also the concept of a robot is not easily defined. One can say that a robot is a computer-controlled, autonomous machine built for real-world functions (see Fig. 2.1 for examples). However, it is not clear whether that definition is sufficient. The Robot Institute of America defines a robot as “a reprogrammable, multifunction manipulator” (1979)1 and the European Common Market defines a robot as “an independently acting and self-controlling machine.” When we define a robot based on what it needs to be complete, we can say that a robot needs manipulators to change either its 1

New Guide to Science by Isaac Asimov, 1984.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018 H. Hamann, Swarm Robotics: A Formal Approach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74528-2_2

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