Introduction

Robots are popularly thought of as mechanical men – humanoid machines capable of performing many of the tasks we engage in all the time, such as walking, talking, picking things up and moving them around, as well as some of those that most of us try to avoid, such as indiscriminate acts of death and destruction. In the next section we will see that this image – and indeed the very idea of a robot – comes from the world of fiction. While it is true that these myths and dreams have seeped into the collective conscious and undoubtedly influence some of the scientific work in the field of robotics, the current reality – though full of enormous interest and potential – is a little less dramatic.

In the research community a typical working definition of a robot goes something like this: a physical device capable of autonomous or pre-programmed behavior in the world involving interactions with its environment through sensors and actuators. In contrast to machines that perform precise repetitive tasks ad nauseam (e.g., robots used in manufacturing production lines), autonomous robots are required to behave in an appropriate way in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Like biological creatures, their behavior must be self-generated, making use of sensory information to moderate their responses to the world.