IB Digital Society 3.7A Types of Robots and Autonomous Technologies Notes

3.7A Types of Robots and Autonomous Technologies

Robots vs Autonomous Technologies

1. A robot is a machine with a physical body that senses its surroundings and acts on them, usually with some autonomy.
2. An autonomous technology is any system that can act on its own to reach a goal, with or without a body.
3. The categories overlap but differ: a factory arm and self-driving car are both (body plus autonomy); a spam filter or virtual assistant is autonomous but bodiless; a toaster has a body but no autonomy, so is neither.
4. The distinction matters. Robots must be safe to share physical space with. Bodiless systems raise a different worry, about hidden decisions and the data they run on.

Industrial Robots

1. Industrial robots are the oldest and most widespread type: programmable arms doing physical factory work (welding, painting, assembly, packing) around the clock.
2. Their strength is consistency in a controlled setting: a predictable environment means they need accuracy and repeatability, not much intelligence. Unimate (1961) was the first.
3. Economics drove their spread: high upfront cost but continuous fixed-rate work, so automation took hold first in high-volume repetitive manufacturing.
4. Impacts: boosted output but displaced routine manual jobs, launching the automation-and-jobs debate that runs through to today's AI.
5. Stakeholders gained unevenly: owners and consumers got cheaper goods, some workers moved to overseeing machines, but the power to share the gains sits with those who own the robots.

Service Robots

1. Service robots perform useful tasks for people outside the factory: robot vacuums, hospital supply carriers, warehouse fetchers, surgical robots.
2. The technical leap is coping with the unexpected: messy, changing surroundings with people moving around, needing sensors, mapping, and real-time decisions a factory never required.
3. They stayed rare until sensing and AI became cheap and good enough.
4. Because they share human space, they raise questions of safety, trust, and reliance; a failure is more serious than a stalled factory line. Whether people should rely on a machine for care work is a values and ethics question, because a mistake can harm someone who cannot easily object.

Social Robots

1. A social robot is built above all to interact with people, using social cues (speech, facial expressions, gestures, eye contact) to feel like a partner rather than a tool.
2. They appear in care homes, classrooms, and receptions. Paro, a therapy robot shaped like a baby seal, has been used in dementia care to lower agitation and lift mood, responding to touch and voice so patients treat it like a pet.
3. The comfort is real to the user even though the robot feels nothing in return, sharpening the identity and values and ethics concepts: is machine comfort genuine or a useful illusion?
4. Stakeholders disagree: carers and families welcome soothing a patient; ethicists worry about deceiving the vulnerable or replacing human contact; budget-holders see a cheaper substitute for staff.

Autonomous Vehicles and Drones

1. Autonomous vehicles and drones are robots built to move through the world, using sensors, cameras, and AI to navigate with little or no human control.
2. A self-driving car reads the road with cameras and radar; a drone (such as DJI consumer models) flies a mapped route to film, survey, or deliver. Continuous sensing plus real-time action makes them autonomous rather than remote-controlled.
3. Autonomy comes in levels: from lane-keeping under supervision, to fully driverless taxis in mapped cities, to pilotless delivery drones. Each step removes more human control and shifts responsibility.
   1. Confusion about who is really in control of a partly autonomous system is itself a source of risk.
4. Mobility makes them powerful and risky: could cut traffic deaths from human error, but raises liability when they crash; drones span crop monitoring, surveillance, and military strikes.
5. Stakeholders face a hard trade: cities and firms gain safer roads and cheaper logistics, but pedestrians and others carry unchosen risks. Unsettled liability (maker, operator, or owner) makes this a power and values and ethics question.

Internet of Things and Virtual Assistants

1. The Internet of Things links everyday objects (lights, thermostats, doorbells) so they sense, share data, and are controlled over a network. These are bodiless autonomous technologies.
2. A virtual assistant (Siri, Alexa) lets us command connected devices by voice, turning the home into a responsive system; genuinely enabling for people with disabilities or limited mobility.
3. The trade-off: microphones and sensors sit throughout private space, always listening and collecting data, so the convenient home is also a monitored one.