responding to
http://www.rittercnc.com/metalworkin...ve-500423-.htm
DA wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:

If it has a human driver, it simply is NOT a robot. It's a servo.

Oh, c'mon - human language (reluctant to say English 'cause robot is not
an English word and, additionally, it's the same word in pretty much every
language) can accommodate for much more flexibility in terminology than
you give us, humans, credit for. We would understand from the context
which type of machine this is. More to the point, when you say "servo" in
this very forum, you'll make people think of a hefty black cylinder that
has a rotating shaft and a bunch of wires coming out of it. Some people
may also think of the controller that drives it. When you say "servo" in
an RC forum, you'll make people think of a small rectangle box with three
wires coming out. And so forth. Also, there are many "servos" in one
industrial "robot". Then what do you call an industrial robot, a "servo
array"? This is exactly a kind of accuracy in terminology that makes
understanding what you're talking about more difficult, not less.

It is generally understood and has been since early 1960s that a "robot"
is a machine (mechanical device) that's expected to do something useful
(hence the name) in place of a human. The exact type of control system and
the degree of human involvement hasn't really been a part of the word's
meaning. The only time you'd call a manipulator "a manipulator" is when
you actually see both the arm and the human driving it making the same
moves. The very same device activated by a program instead would be called
robot by most of us human beings despite the fact that all it's doing is
recalling positions it was driven to by a human earlier.


If it were a robot, you'd simply tell it what the task is, and it would
figure out how to get it done without human intervention, except, of
course, for the guy who tells it what the task is.

What you are describing is Artificial Intelligence and it does not yet
exist, at least not in a way that would be applicable to any work done in
a chaotic environment of a damaged nuclear station. At this point in time
the guy describing the task has to break it down to so many elemental
mini-tasks that if you looked at any of them individually, you'd see no
difference between a robot that moves "intelligently" (ASIMO?) and the
robot that just repeatedly picks up a part from a lathe.

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if we are to use the word
"robot", we have to allow inclusion of less intelligent machines in its
meaning because, frankly, less intelligent is all we have at this point.
Additionally, all human languages work towards word simplification over
time. I guarantee you, you cannot instill "remote manipulator" instead of
"robot" simply because it's harder to say.

And "servo" is not a good replacement either. Although etymologically both
words mean a similar thing (one in Romance languages, another in Slavic),
they both lived their lives differently, so to speak, and came to mean
different things.

So, I'm still for "U.S. *ROBOTS* Enter Damaged Reactors..."

--
DA in PA