We love... Robots
Robin Turner, Western Mail
ROBOTS have captivated cinema audiences and book readers for decades. There is nothing quite like the clunking, Frankenstein-like walk of a mechanical "human" to send a chill down the spine.
And robots have leapt from the screen and the printed page to play a part in our everyday lives.
Most of our cars have been spray-painted, welded and bolted by robots, "thinking" spy planes brimming with missiles are hunting for Osama bin Laden and robots are used in hospitals to dish up drugs to order.
The word robot was first introduced by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which was written in 1920.
It was an adaptation of the slavic word robota which meant drudgery.
When sci-fi enjoyed a huge boom in the late 1940s and '50s with films, comic characters like Dan Dare and books like i, Robot from Isaac Asimov, robots began to become familiar.
And nothing raised their profile more than the phenomenally successful Star Wars movies which paired the comic R2D2 (Artoo for short, played by Kenny Baker) utility robot with the pretentious golden protocol android C-3PO, probably the most famous robots in cinema history.
It was writer Arthur C Clarke who highlighted the potential dark side of robots with his invention HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) computer which starred in the film 2001, A Space Odyssey.
HAL was ultra-sophisticated and was even programmed to appreciate fine art.
Unfortunately for the crew of the Discovery, he was also programmed to lip-read.
When the astronauts whisper about shutting down HAL when he makes a mistake, he cottons on and turns murderer, the human side of him failing to accept death.
In the film world, robots tend to be mechanical systems with a primitive "brain", androids are robots which look like humans and cyborgs are a mixture of human and robot.
The cult movie Blade Runner centred on the dilemma faced by robots which become "too human".
Set against a dystopian, acid rain-plagued city of the future, a band of renegade Nexus-6 androids led by Rutger Hauer (said to have played the part like a cross between a Commanche warrior and a Shakespearean hero) hunt down their scientist maker who has given them a limited lifespan.
Their protagonist is the government agent Dekard (Harrison Ford) but there is a nagging feeling Dekard himself could be a "skin job", the art of android making having become so perfected only hours of psychological testing could tell them from humans.
Currently, hundreds of bomb disposal robots such as the iRobot PackBot and the Foster-Miller TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military to defuse roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Domestic robots are also available which do vacuum cleaning and grass cutting.
Other domestic robots have the aim of providing companionship (social robots) or play partners (ludobots) to people. Examples are Sony's AIBO, a commercially successful robot pet dog, Paro, a robot baby seal intended to soothe nursing home patients, and wakamaru, a humanoid robot intended for elderly and disabled people.
One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci in around 1495.
His notebooks, rediscovered in the 1950s, contain detailed drawings of a mechanical knight able to sit up, wave its arms and move its head and jaw. The designis likely to be based on his anatomical research recorded in the Vitruvian man.
ROBOTS have captivated cinema audiences and book readers for decades. There is nothing quite like the clunking, Frankenstein-like walk of a mechanical "human" to send a chill down the spine.
And robots have leapt from the screen and the printed page to play a part in our everyday lives.
Most of our cars have been spray-painted, welded and bolted by robots, "thinking" spy planes brimming with missiles are hunting for Osama bin Laden and robots are used in hospitals to dish up drugs to order.
The word robot was first introduced by Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which was written in 1920.
It was an adaptation of the slavic word robota which meant drudgery.
When sci-fi enjoyed a huge boom in the late 1940s and '50s with films, comic characters like Dan Dare and books like i, Robot from Isaac Asimov, robots began to become familiar.
And nothing raised their profile more than the phenomenally successful Star Wars movies which paired the comic R2D2 (Artoo for short, played by Kenny Baker) utility robot with the pretentious golden protocol android C-3PO, probably the most famous robots in cinema history.
It was writer Arthur C Clarke who highlighted the potential dark side of robots with his invention HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic) computer which starred in the film 2001, A Space Odyssey.
HAL was ultra-sophisticated and was even programmed to appreciate fine art.
Unfortunately for the crew of the Discovery, he was also programmed to lip-read.
When the astronauts whisper about shutting down HAL when he makes a mistake, he cottons on and turns murderer, the human side of him failing to accept death.
In the film world, robots tend to be mechanical systems with a primitive "brain", androids are robots which look like humans and cyborgs are a mixture of human and robot.
The cult movie Blade Runner centred on the dilemma faced by robots which become "too human".
Set against a dystopian, acid rain-plagued city of the future, a band of renegade Nexus-6 androids led by Rutger Hauer (said to have played the part like a cross between a Commanche warrior and a Shakespearean hero) hunt down their scientist maker who has given them a limited lifespan.
Their protagonist is the government agent Dekard (Harrison Ford) but there is a nagging feeling Dekard himself could be a "skin job", the art of android making having become so perfected only hours of psychological testing could tell them from humans.
Currently, hundreds of bomb disposal robots such as the iRobot PackBot and the Foster-Miller TALON are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military to defuse roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Domestic robots are also available which do vacuum cleaning and grass cutting.
Other domestic robots have the aim of providing companionship (social robots) or play partners (ludobots) to people. Examples are Sony's AIBO, a commercially successful robot pet dog, Paro, a robot baby seal intended to soothe nursing home patients, and wakamaru, a humanoid robot intended for elderly and disabled people.
One of the first recorded designs of a humanoid robot was made by Leonardo da Vinci in around 1495.
His notebooks, rediscovered in the 1950s, contain detailed drawings of a mechanical knight able to sit up, wave its arms and move its head and jaw. The designis likely to be based on his anatomical research recorded in the Vitruvian man.
posted by Nb at
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