Robotics

the term Robotics refers to the science of designing, building, and using robots for a set of tasks. A relatively young field, Robotics draws from many fields of engineering, incluiding mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics.

The most popular applications of robotics is in manufaturing. While Industrial robots were first marketed in 1960, it has only been recently that consumer robotic products have appeared on the market. Among the most popular are the Sony's Aibo, Wowee's Robosapien, Roboraptor, and Robosapien V2, and the as-yet un-released Pleo. Robots are also used to great effect in industrial manufacturing plants for automated tasks.

History

Unusually, the driving force for much development in robotics may be due the efforts of science fiction authors. Authors such as Asimov esentially defined the popular perception of a robot, and their works may have been the inspiration for the current genereation of roboticists. Recently, robots have appeared in mainstream movies such as I, Robot, Bicentennial Man, and Artificial Intelligence.