What is a robot?

In Enrichment group this month we are talking about robots. What is a robot?  What makes something a robot?  (and when get we get our hands on the robots?!?!)  The two groups looked through non-fiction books about robotics and tried to come up with a definition of a robot, then they thought of lots of different things they have experienced or heard of and as a group we sorted them into Yes/Maybe/No categories based on whether or not the group thought it met the qualifications for a robot.

They all agreed that a robot is something that runs on electricity and is programmed by humans (or other robots!)  They all agreed that the robot had to do some sort of job or task, though there was some debate about what that meant.  Does toasting bread count as a task?  Answering questions?  Turning on the power (like a switch or button)??  They also thought, initially, that a robot has to be able to move, but when the discussion got deeper they started to question that assumption.  Does Siri or Amazon's Echo count as a robot?

 

Dictionary.com says a robot is "a machine that resembles a human and does mechanical, routine tasks on command."  Does it have to resemble a human?  The robots in the Tesla factory don't look human.

Google says a robot is "a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer." Programmable by a person first?  Or are they considering the "brains" inn a robot to be the computer programming and the physical part, the part that completes the actions, to be the robot?

NASA says a robot is "a machine that is built to do a certain job again and again, or to do work that might be dangerous for humans."  They should know, right?

I challenged the students to think about specific items and decide if it is a robot or not.  They had to think about a toaster, a copy machine, a smart phone, and a Mars rover.  They found it interesting that there isn't exactly a right or wrong answer since there isn't an exact definition of "robot."

What Is A Robot?, an article on wired.com, quotes Andy Rubin, father of Android, as saying, a robot must sense, it must compute, and it must acute.  By that definition a stop light isn't much different from a Roomba vacuum cleaner.  Scott Dadich, the articles author, goes to on to say that as robots because more social perhaps we need to add a fourth criteria: to relate.  He says,"Maybe that’s a fourth step that Rubin didn’t think he had to articulate: sense, compute, actuate … and then relate to us. When that starts to happen, we’re going to want to rethink our definition of robot yet again."

Finally, FINALLY, I let them do what they really wanted to do: make a robot!!!