They interact with the physical world via sensors and actuators. Because they are reprogrammable, they are more flexible than single-function machines. Within industrial automation, robots are used as a flexible way to automate a physical task or process. Collaborative robots are designed to carry out the task in the same way a human would.
More traditional industrial robots tend to carry out the task more efficiently than a human would. To make it a little more complex, some robots are "autonomous" meaning that they operate without humans directly controlling them but they are not used in automation. For example, a toy line-following robot can autonomously follow a line painted on the ground.
However, it is not "automation" because it isn't performing a specific task. If instead the line-following robot were transporting medicines around a hospital, then it would be automation.
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Select Topics. Latest Blog Post. What's the Difference Between Automation and Robotics? Leave a comment. Written by Alex Owen-Hill. Alex Owen-Hill is a freelance writer and public speaker who blogs about a large range of topics, including science, presentation skills at CreateClarifyArticulate. He uses a goose feather to write, which he inks from time to time, including a shake of the wrist to prevent ink from spilling.
His eyes follow the text being written, and his head moves when he takes some ink. What is the difference between automaton and robot? Who invented automatons? Are humans automatons? In fact, a study of literary references as automatically collated by Google Ngram shows that 'automaton' and 'automata' have continued to be widely used alongside 'robot' and 'robots' to the present day. We owe its expert compilers a debt of gratitude for their research; and while the book looks beyond the simple history of robots as machines to address essentially philosophical questions such as the difference between a robot and a human, questions that exceed the scope of this article, we shall refer extensively to its historical findings here, in summary form.
Contributing author E. Truitt traces the production of automata back to the 3 rd century BCE, and the moving figures designed and built by engineers trained in Alexandria, ancient Egypt [2]. During the Ptolemaic Dynasty that ruled Egypt for the next three centuries, moving figures and statues of humans including mechanical trumpeters , animals and mythological beasts were integrated into the Royal pageantry.
In early medieval times, Arabic-speaking scholars translated ancient Greek texts on automata into Arabic, paving the way for further developments in automation engineering over the following centuries. Truitt records [4] that Arabic mechanical engineers introduced new types of gears and valves that assisted them in producing more complex automata than the ancient Alexandrians had managed, including among other examples wine-servants able both to pour a liquid from a large vessel to a smaller one and to hand the smaller vessel to a human; water-clocks tracking time with moving zodiacal dials; and programmable water jets and fountains.
There are surviving eyewitness accounts of chirping mechanical birds in middle-eastern palaces as early as the 9 th and 10 th centuries, with some reports of mechanical lions in what was then known as Constantinople nowadays Istanbul.
The knowledge of how to make mechanical birds had spread to western Europe a few centuries later, and realistic examples were found at Hesdin, the French chateau of Count Robert II of Artois in Picardy, in the 14 th century, alongside mechanical monkeys [5]. Albertus Magnus, a 14 th century Dominican friar who was also an astrologer, created a talking metal statue that pronounced oracular responses to questions asked to it before it was deliberately broken by Saint Thomas Aquinas, another friar from the same order who had studied under Albert but believed the automaton to be an evil idol [7].
By the sixteenth century, the creation of realistically human-looking robotic figures had become more commonplace, and the sophistication of robotic engineering had been considerably refined and developed. Robotic musicians able to play instruments were now featured alongside robotic dancers. In religious settings, robotic monks were popular for display, alongside bleeding models of Jesus and roaring depictions of Satan. A surviving example of the Renaissance robotic monk, commissioned by King Philip II of Spain, used a clockwork mechanism to pray, walk, move its lips, lift objects, and beat its chest.
In the s, Swiss clockmaker Pierre Jacquet-Droz built a series of sophisticated robots, some of which are kept in working condition to this day. They include a breathing woman playing a harpsichord, and a boy writing a series of notes with real ink drawn from a quill.
Also in the s, Belgian mechanic Joseph Merlin created a mechanical swan able to dive into a mechanical bed of turbulent water, and catch and swallow a small mechanical fish [13] ; while Hungarian Wolfgang von Kempelen created a remote-controlled chess-playing Turk that became a popular stage showpiece on tour, its mechanical arm liftable to move chess pieces between squares on demand by the concealed controller, thereby creating the illusion of artificial intelligence [14].
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