(most people will have seen the advertisements showing a robotic arm painting a car for example.  It makes a series of rotational controlled movements and 'appears' to know exactly what it is doing and appears to have its own reality whereas in fact it is just a pre-programmed and very useful machine when turned on and just a bunch of gears and levers when turned off).

As more and more robots are made and used for more and more varied work these machines are becoming very complex and it is very difficult nowadays to describe robots on mass but everybody knows what a robot is when they are looking at one.  Whether this will be the case in the future remains to be be seen.

As with any machine accidents can happen, parts can wear out or become faulty and they need to be serviced regularly.  There has been at least one case where a robot has continued to work in its recognized way and killed a human being because that human being failed to turn it off before starting to repair it. 

FACTORY ROBOTS

1. Car production.   Automobile factories have hundreds of industrial robots working on their production lines. A vehicle chassis runs along the production line and is welded, glued painted and assembled by a series of robot stations. Human workers maintain and control these robots.

2. Electronics.  Circuit boards are almost all mass produced and put together nowadays by robots. They are called pick and place robots for obvious reasons. They pick up a part and place it onto a circuit board.  Robots can repeat these actions at a fraction of the speed that a human can and they are very accurate and dont ever get tired..

3. Packaging.  Industrial robots are now used extensively to package manufactured goods.  They are found on most conveyor belts doing jobs such as collecting tins and quickly boxing them. They can be programmed to do many hard and tedius jobs to do with loading and unloading.

4. AGV's (Automated Guided Vehicles) These are called Mobile Robots. These machines move goods around large areas such as factories or hospitals.  They work by following lines or markers or wires on the floor. some now have laser vision or stereo vision  whereas they started as very simple robots who just moved things from A to B with no regard to anything else that was in its environment have now been developed with a small amount of intelligence.and can sense when something is in its path and stop or move around the obstruction.They can now perform non repetitive jobs if they are programmed with a map and some rules.

(This is  a very simple description of the actions of these robots just to give a lay person some idea of the work a robots do in this particular environment)  There are all sorts of rules and regulations that come into play.

ROBOTS IN THE HOME

Robots have now been designed that vacuum and cut lawns and clean floors. These are autonomous machines and in the last few years have become relatively inexpensive. They require a start command and will proceed to do the task at hand thus saving on human time and labour. They are considered to be intelligent robots as they are programmed to do a certain task in a certain way but for example stop if some object is in its path and go around it if programmed to do so.  These machines will be programmed with more intelligence and will become used in more households in the future as prices drop and production increases.

TELEROBOTS

These are robots which work at a distance from the human operator.  For example a doctor can control a robot without needing to be in the same room or the same town or even the same part of the world as the robot. All he needs is to connected by wireless or computer to a screen and he can control the robot from his end.  These robots are also used in places where it would be dangerous to use a human being (such as a war zone).  The convenience of being able to use these robots without travelling great distances or into dangerous environemnts is obvious and also can be life saving (such as a doctor operating remotely on a patient in an emergency) .  These robots are evolving very quickly as more uses are found for their services.

MILITARY ROBOTS

Teleoperated robotic aircraft are widely used today. 

THE PREDATOR is a well known example.These robots can be controlled from anywhere in the world allowing a search (and destroy if necessary) mission to go ahead without endangering the operator (who is usually an army).

PACKBOT and FOSTER-MILLER TALON are the names of two types of robot being used in warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. These robots can diffuse road side bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDS) without endangering the lives of the operators.

MIDARS and SEEKUR are robots being developed to act in a surveillance  and security capacity thus freeing up soldiers for other duties.

THE CRUSHER is another automated unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) which is being developed to perform pre-programmed military missions

CARE OF THE ELDERLY.

Nowadays people are living longer and there are more seniors in the world than ever before.  Older people often require assistance which up until now younger people have had to supply. Robots are being developed to assist and possibly take over these tasks in the future.

FUTURISTIC ROBOTS

NANOROBOTS also called (NANOBOTS or NANITES)

This type of robot will be used in the future often in medical areas.  It is a very complicated science to develop and below are just a few examples.

SOFT ROBOTS  ....Scientists are working on making robots from soft tissues (similar to that of humans) in the future.  Whereas at present they are made of hard often metallic or Plastic materials.  There has recently been a robot made from a silicone substance. They are also working on reducing the size of these robots so they can be put to work in the field of virus or bacteria studies.