Design Your Own Robot:
Pre-Activities

You will soon have the opportunity to design and build your own robot, using an on-line interactive exhibit. In this interactive, you will be asked to design one or more robots to accomplish specific tasks. The tasks we have chosen are ones that are actually being done by robots in the real world. When you have finished designing and building your own robot, you will be able to link to other Web pages showing real-world robots that are performing the task for which you designed your robot.

The tasks in the Design Your Own Robot interactive are:

• exploring the surface of Mars
• searching a sunken ship for gold
• exploring a live volcano
• cleaning up solid nuclear waste
• patrolling a building
• entertaining humans at a party.

For each robot that you build, you will have to choose options for six major robot characteristics. These are:

• looks
• sensing
• movement
• manipulation
• energy
• intelligence.

Each characteristic gives rise to one or more questions:

• Looks: What does the robot look like? Is there a reason for it to look as it does?
• Sensing: How does the robot "know" or figure out what's in its environment? If it were put in a different environment, would it be able to figure out this new environment?
• Movement: How does the robot move within its environment? If it were put in a different environment, would it still be able to move within this new space?
• Manipulation: How does the robot move or manipulate other objects within its environment? Can a single robot move or manipulate more than one kind of object?
• Energy: How is the robot powered? Can it have more than one energy source?
• Intelligence: How does the robot "think?" What does it mean to say that a robot "thinks?"

Not all robots have to have all six characteristics. For example, some robots don't need to manipulate things, so they have no manipulating characteristics. Some robots have more than one manifestation of a characteristic. For example, a robot may be able to sense its environment using both a vision system and sonar.

Before designing your own robot, you might want to think about:

• situations or tasks for which it makes more sense to use robots rather than humans, and vice versa.
• why it has been difficult to build robots that replicate human characteristics.
• whether it will ever be possible to build a robot whose intelligence will be close to that of a person.

You may also want to:

• list all the robots you know, whether from movies, television, literature, toys, etc., and then think about why all these creatures are considered to be robots.
• think about how you can tell if something is a robot. Is it by looks, behavior, or something else?
• Ask how you might communicate with a robot. Would you use speech, press button, type words, make gestures? Are these things different from what you'd do if you were talking to a computer?