21st Century Skills InnovatIon LIbrary Robots EMERGING T h e c Cherry Lake PubLishing ann arbor MiChigan by Josh Gregory
EMERGING TeCh Chapter 1 A Long History W hen you hear the word robot what comes to mind Maybe you think of a movie like Star Wars where robot characters play important roles as heroes and villains Or maybe there are robots in your favorite video games or comic books Or maybe your first thought isn’t of a story at all Maybe it’s of a robot that you see every day in your own home For a very long time robots existed mostly in peo ple’s imaginations The idea of a machine that could move and think without being directly controlled by a For the movie Star Wars The Force Awakens engineers built a real working robot to play the character of BB-8 44
human operator was considered science fiction Some forward-thinking inventors sketched out designs and even built robot-like machines But even they couldn’t have imagined the variety of incredible robots that exist today Some are tiny while others are enormous Some look a lot like people or animals but many don’t look like anything else you’ve ever seen before They often are used to complete important jobs But there are also many robots that were built just for fun What exactly makes something a robot After all many of the electronic devices people use today are able to think for themselves Some of them can even carry on conversations with users However a com puter or a smartphone is not the same thing as a robot A robot is a mechanical device that has the ability to move around in some way Robots often have motors arms legs or wheels Some can grab things the way hands do Others have faces that can move to form humanlike facial expressions Some can walk or drive around while others are stuck in one place Robots must also be able to operate without humans controlling them This means they must have a computerized brain that can be programmed The simplest robots are programmed to complete the 5 ROBOTS
