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What is a "Robot?"
In Gareth Branwyn's 2004 book, The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Building Robots, he contacted a number of prominent robot scientists, engineers, and hobbyists, and asked them to define the word "robot." No two definitions were the same. But from them in aggregate, a widely-applicable definition was boiled down:
Any machine that senses its environment (in some way), organizes a reaction (in some way), and then executes it (based on the sensor input), can be considered a robot.
Robots that comply with this design are usually said to have a "sense/plan/act" architecture. The extremely basic BEAM robots don't do any digital computation, build no map of their world, and perform their actions based on a near-direct connection to their sensors (usually mediated by oscillators). They are said to have a "sense/act" design. But one can argue that even here, the simple oscillators -- analog ICs passing a signal back and forth -- act as a sort of nervous system. In fact, in BEAM parlance, they're called a "nervous net."
Most experts and enthusiasts also contend that to be a true robot, a machine must have autonomy (i.e. not be remote-controlled, on a tether, etc.) and can, ideally, recharge itself.
One of the strangest definitions Gareth collected was from Marc Thorpe, creator of Robot Wars. He argued that the word robot can be applied to any mechanical "being" that has an identity and a name. So, in this sense, even a robot tin toy is a robot because we humans relate to it as such. But most people involved in the field of robotics subscribe to some variation of the first definition.
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