TIME TO Look around you Most things you see have been made by people Everything from the chair you are sitting on to the computer you are working at has been made by either a person or a machine And if it was made by a machine then that machine was made by a person somewhere down the line Someone thought about it and someone invented it MAKERS Making things makes us who we are It is why most of us live in houses and not in trees or caves We built shelters We built tools that made jobs easier We turned these tools into machines that work for us Recently we have turned these machines into robots that can think for themselves But making is about more than just building things Unlike most of the animals around us we imagine and we create We learn from our mistakes and grow through experimentation And most of all we share our knowledge so we can keep on improving what we make A lot of people both students and professionals are making the robots of
MAKING ROBOTS In this book we will be learning about robots Robots were created because people experimented with machines that made work easier They imagined they created they tested they made mistakes and they learned from those mistakes They shared their knowledge and inspired others to build better robots Robots were imagined centuries ago and only started to do work in the 1900s Today robots are a big part of our lives MAKERSPACES In this book we will be learning from others who have changed the world by making things We will follow their process of turning ideas into reality Places where knowledge is shared and people build things are called makerspaces In these places we unleash our creativity and invent new ways of doing things or adapt old ways to make new things We learn and grow Makerspaces can be found anywhere like your library your community center your school or even on the Internet By reading this book and trying some of the activities inside you can create your own makerspace n Yeo Monty made by the robotics company Anybots can pick things up and is operated remotely by a person using a special glove Y BOT Be a Maker What sort of robot would you build if you could What would you want it to do Have you read anything about robots or seen robots in
INSPIRATION When we first made tools to make our jobs easier we imagined how great it would be if the tools could do all our work for us That is when we started thinking about robots or automatons In 200 BCE a Greek mathematician named Ctesibius made a device called a clepsydra This was a clock that used the weight of water to tell time Ctesibius s idea of storing the energy of water and letting gravity do the work led to other innovations such as using tension in a spring to power a clock Eventually we learned to burn coal to make steam and power engines which kicked off the Industrial Revolution ROBOT REVOLUTION MGM PRESENTS Once we created machines that could do FORBIDDEN PLANEY AMAZING some of our work some people wondered if we could create machines that could be like us In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein a book about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who used electricity to turn a corpse into a living being similar to a robot In 1920 Czech playwright Karel Capek wrote Rossum s Universal Robots which imagined people building millions of robots to do all the work Capek was the first to use the word robot As shown by this movie poster in the science fiction movies of the 1950s robots were a very threatening presence VAUER POGOT AME FRANOIS LESLIE NELSON WARREN SEAS ROBBY THE ROBOT DRIL HOME RED MAID MCO NGAS RAK CINEMASCOPE COLOR
At first these stories did not end well Shelley's Frankenstein created an uncontrollable monster Capek s robots replaced the human race Starting in the 1950s science fiction writers like Isaac Asimov helped change things by writing stories about how robots and humans could work together ROBOTS BECOME REAL eSIMO Meanwhile machines were getting more complex In 1948 a British scientist named William Grey Walter designed the first robot that could move on its own By 1961 robotic arms were used to produce goods in hours that would take human workers weeks HONDA People feared robots could replace human workers and put everyone out of work But robots also made lives better manufacturing goods like automobiles televisions and computers so cheaply that more people could afford to buy them ASIMO manufactured by Honda is the first robot to walk on its own It is being designed to be useful around the home Be a Maker Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics a set of rules about robots found in his science fiction books were a safety device to ensure the robots in his stories always obeyed humans and didn't attempt to destroy their creators These laws don't actually exist but they helped people stop thinking of robots as a threat Why do you think people were so afraid of robots in the past Should they have
