Robotics — building a body that can sense, think and act
A Koinder Global Limited production
A finished body that cannot move is still dry bones. Come and learn what the breath is.
The prophet Ezekiel was set down in the middle of a valley. It was full of bones — dry, scattered, lifeless. And a voice asked him: "Son of man, can these bones live?"
Then he watched something happen, and it happened in order:
There was a rattling, and bone came to bone — the frame.
Then sinews came upon them — the joints that let a thing bend.
Then flesh and skin covered them — the body was complete.
And they stood there… but there was no breath in them. Perfect bodies. Completely still.
Only when breath entered them did they stand up and live.
Now come to America, to a factory. Inside, men worked at a die-casting machine — lifting pieces of red-hot metal out of a furnace, all day, every day. It was work that burned people. It took fingers. Sometimes it took more.
An engineer named George Devol had drawn up a patent for a machine arm that could be told what to do and then repeat it. But drawings do not save anybody's hands.
Then he met Joseph Engelberger, an engineer who had grown up reading Isaac Asimov's robot stories.
Here is what was bothering Engelberger: "Why should a human being do a job that is going to injure him, when it is a job that does not need a human mind at all?"
Notice that carefully. He was not asking "how do I replace workers?" He was asking "which jobs are hurting people who should not be doing them?" That question is the whole reason robotics exists.
In 1961 they installed the first one — the Unimate — at a General Motors plant in New Jersey. Its job was to lift the hot metal. It never got burned. And a man went home with both his hands.
SENSE. Your eyes see the pot. Your skin feels the heat.
THINK. Your brain decides: too hot — use a cloth.
ACT. Your arm reaches, your fingers close, you lift.
And then you do it again, non-stop, without ever noticing.
SENSE. A switch closes when the mould is ready.
THINK. The program decides: mould is ready — begin the lift.
ACT. Motors turn, the arm swings, the grip closes, it lifts.
And then it does it again — ten thousand times, and it never gets tired or burned.
A person in a kitchen in Abuja. A steel arm in a factory in New Jersey. One has skin and a soul; the other has wires and oil.
But the loop is exactly the same, and it never stops turning.
This is why you can build a robot even though you cannot build a human. You are not copying a person. You are copying a loop.
SENSE — take in the world (eyes, switches, cameras, whiskers)
THINK — decide what that means (this is the breath — the code)
ACT — change the world (motors, wheels, grippers, wings)
Then loop. For ever. Every robot ever built — the arm welding a car, the drone over a farm in Kaduna, the little machine on Mars — is turning this same loop right now.
Remove any one of the three and the robot dies, exactly like the bodies in the valley that had no breath.
Below is a robot that must follow a black line. It is missing its parts. Add them one at a time and watch what happens each time. Pay attention to how it fails — the failure is the lesson.
Same shape every time. Only one thing changes. Go slowly.
Look around your compound today and find one job that is hurting somebody — carrying something too heavy, bending too long, standing in the sun. That is the exact question Engelberger asked in 1961.
Now write down its three parts. What would it need to sense? What would it have to think? What would it act on?