Robot rovers with wheels drive around on Mars to explore it. A small rover named Sojourner landed there in 1997. A Mars rover drives to different spots and uses a robot arm to hold tools up to rocks it wants to study. The Curiosity rover carries 17 cameras. Some robots use rangefinders to measure how far away things are, and some use them to make 3D maps of their surroundings.
A small robot helicopter named Ingenuity flew on Mars. It rode to Mars strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover. On April 19, 2021, it was the first aircraft to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. It was built to make five test flights in 30 days, but it flew 72 times over nearly three years.
Some robots are very small. In 2016 Harvard scientists built the octobot, a small 3D-printed robot with a body that is entirely soft. A chemical reaction inside the octobot turns a little liquid fuel into a lot of gas. The gas flows into its arms and inflates them like a balloon. In 2014 Harvard scientists made 1,024 tiny robots, called Kilobots, that could build shapes together as a swarm. The swarm could arrange itself into shapes such as a star, a wrench and the letter K. The Kilobots had no robot or person in charge of the shape. Each followed simple rules.
The word robot comes from a play that was written long ago. The play is called R.U.R., which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. In the play, an inventor makes human-like machines to take over human work. The play is a critique of machines that dehumanize people. The Czech word robota means forced work. Karel Δapek said that his brother Josef, an artist, came up with the word.
The writer Isaac Asimov imagined Three Laws of Robotics in his science fiction stories. The laws are part of his stories. In his stories the First Law says a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Robots often do jobs that are dangerous, hard or boring for people. They do jobs that people would rather leave to machines. Experts do not all agree on exactly what counts as a robot.
Words to know
- rover: wheeled robot
- rangefinders: distance measurers
- octobot: soft robot
- swarm: robots working together
- critique: a close look
