Robots: A hardware or software

Robot is the most ubiquitous word in daily literature for past few decades; while growing up like all 1980’s born I thought robot as same metal body structure which performs task automatically and support my thought movies like Bicentennial Man, Short Circuit, Terminator 2, etc., made me believe in it. In fact it fascinated to that extent that I started to dream about robotics as my career. Now that I am in robotics and its allied fields for nearly a decade. I thought to compile my thoughts that is robotics really is a hardware or software entity.

If I look into the past of the medieval era one of the most influential figure in history with respect to science was the great genius Leonardo Da Vinci. He was the man who was way head of his times and he left no stones unturned in robotics too, where he came up with mechanical humanoid known as Vitruian Man performing the role of mechanical knight. Even though not much is known about Vitruian Man some NASA scientist claimed it could walk, sit and move jobs like humans.

In the last century, robotics was no different with the metal frames, but it was just clubbed with chips and integrated circuits. The biggest difference here is there control of the robots is done with the help of software programmed to do the specialized task assigned to the robot.

Now presently every person has robots in there pockets, lets assume a simple voice assistant with your mobile phones be Siri/OK Google, when a user ask certain questions to these software apps it replies back with suitable answer as best example of soft bots.

Be any ages we are always surrounded by robots. In my opinion robots can be hardware, software or both. To bottom line the dilemma of robot being a hardware or a software, I would rather go to the epistemology of the word robot which derived from from the Slavic decent word ‘robota’ which means a forced labor whose sole purpose is to serve his master, this make find a synonym robot to control system.

I am Kiran Kumar Adam, Working at the Center for Robolution as a Robotics Application Research Engineer, If rest of the robotism universe supports me just drop down a mail for me at kiran@robolution.center .