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12/21/22 SENSORS AND ROBOT PROGRAMMING Week 3 IE454: Industrial Robots Dr. Majed Moosa 1 A VIDEO: NEXT GENERATION ROBOTS 2 1 12/21/22 ARE RO BOTS SIM ILAR TO H U M AN ? • Unlike humans • Robots are not limited to the Five Senses • Robots use a variety of different electromechnical SENSORS to...

12/21/22 SENSORS AND ROBOT PROGRAMMING Week 3 IE454: Industrial Robots Dr. Majed Moosa 1 A VIDEO: NEXT GENERATION ROBOTS 2 1 12/21/22 ARE RO BOTS SIM ILAR TO H U M AN ? • Unlike humans • Robots are not limited to the Five Senses • Robots use a variety of different electromechnical SENSORS to: • Explore • Understand • The environment and THEMSELVES • Imitating a living creature’s senses is currently Very Difficult • Researchers and developers have resorted to alternative to biological senses. 3 WHAT CAN HUMANS SENSE THAT ROBOTS CAN’T? • Using a camera, a robot may be able to pick up an image made up of billions of pixels Robots can see, but! • BUT without significant programming, it would not know what any of those pixels meant • Distance sensors would indicate the distance to an object • BUT would not stop a robot from bumping into it • Researchers and companies are experimenting with a variety of different approaches to permit a robot to not only “see” but “understand” what it is looking at. • It may be a long time before a robot is able to differentiate between objects placed before it on a table, especially if they do not appear to be exactly the same as what is in its database of objects. • Robots have a really hard time tasting and smelling. • A human may be able to tell you “this tastes sweet” or “this smells bad” • A robot would need to analyze the chemical composition and then look up the substance in a database to determine if humans have marked the taste as being “sweet” or the smell as being “bad” 4 2 12/21/22 WHAT CAN HUMANS SENSE THAT ROBOTS CAN’T? • Humans have nerve endings throughout their skin and as such, we know when we have touched an object or when something has touched us Robots vs touching, but! • Robots are equipped with buttons or simple contacts placed in strategic locations (for example on a front bumper) to determine if it has come into contact with an object. • Robot pets may have contact or force sensors placed in their head, feet and back, but if you try to touch an area where there is no sensor, the robot has no way of knowing it has been touched and will not react. • As research into humanoid robots continues, perhaps an “electromechanical skin” will be developed. 5 WHAT CAN ROBOTS SENSE THAT HUMANS CAN’T? • Although a robot cannot tell you if a substance tastes good or if an odour smells bad • Steps involved in analyzing the chemical composition can give it far more information than a normal human could about its properties • A robot, equipped with a carbon monoxide sensor, would be able to detect carbon monoxide gas which is otherwise colorless, odorless to humans. • A robot would also be able to tell you the Ph level of a substance to determine if it is acidic or basic and much, much more. • A human might tell you “the tree looks to be about 15 meter away” • but a robot, equipped with the right distance sensors, can tell you “the tree is 14.1 meter away” • Other examples, angular or linear acceleration 6 3 12/21/22 TYPES OF SENSORS: CONTACT • Push button/ Contact switch • Pressure sensor • Unlike a push button which offers one of two possible readings (ON or OFF), • It produces an output proportional to the force that is being applied to it. Switches, buttons, and contact sensors are used to detect physical contact between objects and are not just restricted to humans pushing buttons 7 TYPES OF SENSORS: DISTANCE • Ultrasonic Range Finders • Infrared • Infrared light, which as we saw is used in communication, can also be used to measure distance. Ultrasonic range finders use acoustics to measure the time between when a signal is sent versus when its echo is received back. 8 4 12/21/22 TYPES OF SENSORS: DISTANCE • Laser • Stretch and Bend Sensors • A stretch sensor is • Lasers are used when high accuracy, or long distances (or both) are required when measuring the range to an object • Very accurate, very long range 9 WHICH SENSORS? 10 5 12/21/22 ROBOT PROGRAMMING • There are many programming languages which can be used to program microcontrollers, the most common of which are: • Assembly • Basic • C/C++ • Java • .NET/C • Processing • Python 11 6