Thanks to science fiction, we believe that someday we will be surrounded by crowds of intelligent and obedient robots who will replace us in production, freeing us from repetitive or dangerous labor. However, the robotics themselves are skeptical about this prospect. Is the coming invasion of robots a myth?
TELEVISION CONTROLLED WORLD
At the beginning of the twentieth century, futurists expressed the opinion that soon tele-controlled (remotely controlled) vehicles would be used in war, the drivers of which would be at a safe distance from the battlefield.
Indeed, attempts to defeat the enemy using military robots have been made repeatedly. In 1915, the Fernlenk Boote remote-controlled exploding boats were accepted into the German fleet. The biggest success in their use was the attack on the British monitor "Erebus" on October 28, 1917. At the same time, in the spring and summer of 1917, the radio-controlled Aerial Target, built under the guidance of the English physicist Archibald Lowe, made its first flights.
Today, telecontrol is most widespread in astronautics: all satellites, interplanetary vehicles, cargo and manned spacecraft are somehow controlled from the Earth through space communication points. The missions of the "Lunokhod" in 1970 and 1973 became a kind of apotheosis, the success of which was blocked in our time by the American rovers "Spirit", "Opportunity" and "Curiosity".
On the basis of space experience, self-propelled robots have been developed capable of performing tasks in areas with an increased radiation background: the complexes Klin, Krot, Ural, Magnitokhod, Pioneer, Mobot took part in the elimination of the consequences of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant -CH-HV "," STR "and" RDK ". Similar systems are used in radioactive waste storage facilities.
In addition to astronautics and exclusion zones, remote-controlled mechanisms are widely used in aviation. Unmanned aerial vehicles, called "drones", entered serial production, first as targets, then as reconnaissance vehicles. The advent of the global positioning system has expanded their capabilities: now they are increasingly used to search for possible targets and even strike at them. Simpler "drones" are available to civilian buyers who purchase them for tourism or original photography.
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Of course, telecontrolled systems cannot be called full-fledged robots. They are too dependent on the will of the human operator, being essentially an "extension" of his body. However, their ability to expand the space for obtaining information about the surrounding space also changes our attitude towards it. Today, anyone, without leaving home, can become an explorer of the planet, ocean and space, joining one of the existing projects of using remotely controlled robots or launching their own.
WITHOUT A MAN - ANYWHERE
When operating remotely controlled systems, situations arise when the robot must make decisions on its own. For example, in distant space missions, signal delay begins to affect, which scientists encountered at the very first attempts to land research vehicles on Mars. Therefore, the development of autonomy in robotics remains one of the most important areas.
The need for systems that are able to adequately respond to changes in the situation arose with the advent of long-range aviation. The very first autopilot that could keep course and altitude was built by Lawrence Sperry in 1914, and already in 1947, the American C-54 military aircraft made a transatlantic flight under full control of the autopilot, including takeoff and landing.
A modern autopilot includes a powerful computer, moreover, manufactured with a large margin of reliability: for example, the AFDS-770 installed on Boeing 777 airliners uses radiation-resistant FCP-2002 microprocessors, which are quite suitable for spacecraft.
Nevertheless, experts in transport safety note that a new problem arises: the autopilot, on the one hand, makes it easier for the pilots, but on the other hand, makes them helpless in a situation of technical failure. Blind trust in the on-board computer turns into disasters that could have been avoided if the pilots understood the logic of the autopilot in extreme modes. It turns out that the pilot of the future must have more extensive knowledge of aircraft control than his predecessor, who relied only on his own hands and experience.
Similar problems await projects for the introduction of self-driving cars. Such old companies as General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Volvo, Nissan, and such newcomers as Google, Apple are preparing for their serial production., "Tesla". Experts warn that the most unusual emergencies are possible during mass exploitation, therefore, a passenger in an unmanned vehicle will need the skills of an experienced driver in order to avoid death.
The autopilot is much closer to the image of an intelligent machine, known to us from science fiction than remote-controlled vehicles, but it clearly demonstrates why we are still very far from the emergence of truly autonomous robots. Obeying the laid down programs, the autopilot is able to work quite efficiently under the conditions that the programmers were able to predict, but it can “go wild” if the conditions turn out to be different, therefore, constant supervision by a qualified specialist who understands both what the autopilot does and how it works.
ALMOST LIKE PEOPLE?
Science fiction pushed scientists to create androids - mechanical creatures that cannot be distinguished from humans. In the early 1970s, Japanese experts from Waseda University introduced the Wabot-1 robot to the world, which was able to walk, talk to people and navigate in space using external receptors that mimic eyes and ears. The success inspired other developers, and Japanese scientific teams took the lead in designing androids. In 2003, Osaka University staff demonstrated an Actroid robot with silicone skin that looks like a human. Since then, several Repliee models have been released that look like a middle-aged Japanese woman. The movement of the lower body in all models is limited, but they have developed facial expressions, they can imitate blinking, breathing,know how to understand human speech and adequately answer questions.
Recently, humanoid robots have appeared in space. On February 24, 2011, the space shuttle "Discovery" delivered into orbit the remote-controlled robonaut "R2", which consists of two bodies: the upper body is anthropomorphic, the lower one is replaceable and each of its variants is designed to solve special problems. As an alternative, Russian developers offer a robot named Fedor (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research). He is quite mobile, autonomous, obeys voice commands and even knows how to drive a car! Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin promised that Fedor will go on one of the space missions no later than 2021.
Of course, all these projects make a strong impression, but, as experts say, androids will forever remain unique and expensive toys. Even a robot nurse or a robot porter is much more profitable to make it not so much anthropomorphic as functional: two arms and two legs complicate the design, giving no advantages other than aesthetic.
However, everything is changing, including aesthetics, and it is possible that in the future, projects of humanoid mechanisms that surprise us today will be perceived tomorrow as a technical curiosity in the spirit of steam-powered airplanes or underground boats.
Anton Pervushin