Discusses the global robotics industry, specifically how key foreign nations support commercial robots, while almost all of America’s vast spending on this technology goes to military and space exploration uses.

Robotics: An Introduction

The concept of a robot as we know it today evolved over many years. In fact, its origins could be traced to ancient Greece well before the time when Archimedes invented the screw pump. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) made far-reaching contributions to the field of robotics with his pioneering research into the brain that led him to make discoveries in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. He provided physical explanations of how the brain processes visual and other sensory inputs and invented a number of ingenious machines. His flying devices, although not practicable, embodied sound principles of aerodynamics, and a toy built to bring to fruition Leonardo's drawing inspired the Wright brothers in building their own flying machine, which was successfully flown in 1903. The word robot itself seems to have first appeared in 1921 in Karel Capek's play, Rossum's Universal Robots, and originated from the Slavic languages. In many of these languages the word robot is quite common as it stands for worker. It is derived from the Czech word robitit, which implies drudgery. Indeed, robots were conceived as machines capable of repetitive tasks requiring a lower intelligence than that of humans. Yet today robots are thought to be capable of possessing intelligence, and the term is probably inappropriate. Nevertheless it is in use. The term robotics was probably first coined in science fiction work published around the 1950s by Isaac Asimov, who also enunciated his three laws of robotics. It was from Asimov's work that the concept of emulating humans emerged.

ARNE's key physical component is a 300 mm diameter disc which supports the control electronics and the rotating sonar sensor. Below the disc is a chassis which holds the motors and shaft encoders to control the two drive wheels.

5.1 Hardware

ARNE has a drive wheel on each side of the chassis and a low-friction castor at the back. It moves holonomically, turning the wheels in the same direction to move forward or in opposite directions to rotate on the spot. Shaft encoders with a precision of 1024 steps per revolution determine the distance travelled by each wheel to a precision of 0.2 mm.

At the lowest level, the wheel movements are controlled by two dedicated HCTL-1100 motion control chips (Hewlett-Packard 1992, pages 1–77 to 1–115) which generate and execute trapezoidal velocity profiles. The length, acceleration and peak velocity of these movements are specified by the on-board CPU, a 68000-compatible ‘Mini-Module’ micro controller from PSI Systems Limited (PSI 1991).

ARNE's only range sensor is a single rotating Polaroid ultrasonic rangeflnder (Polaroid 1991) which can be seen in Figure 5.1 on top of the box which houses the CPU and other control electronics. The transducer is rotated by a stepper motor with a minimum step size of 1.8°. A full 360° scan is performed in twenty 18° steps.

Section 1.3 explained the decision to connect ARNE to a stationary workstation. A 9600–baud connection to the Mini Module's RS485 serial port was used for this purpose.

Manufacturing in cleanroom environments

Clean environments are required for manufacturing modern electronics devices, in particular semiconductor devices, but also hard disks, flat panel displays (FPDs), and solar panels. Wafer processing in the semiconductor industry includes some of the most demanding processes in terms of complexity and cleanliness, due to the submicron dimensions of modern semiconductor devices. This book focuses on industrial cleanroom robotics in semiconductor and FPD manufacturing. Both industries experienced phenomenal technical advancement and growth in the 1980s and 1990s and have established manufacturing facilities in several geographic regions: North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific Rim. India may emerge as another manufacturing region. The market for semiconductor manufacturing equipment was valued at approximately US$45.5 billion in 2007. The market for FPD manufacturing equipment surpassed the US$1 billion mark in 1997 for the first time. In 2008 it was estimated at US$10 billion.

Cleanroom requirements

Cleanrooms are isolated environments in which humidity, temperature, and particulate contamination are monitored and controlled within specified parameters (SEMI standard E70). Particulates are fine particles, solid or liquid, that are suspended in a gas. Particulate sizes range from less than 10 nm to more than 100 µm. Particulates of less than 100 nm are called ultra-fine particles. Here the term ‘particle’ is used throughout, representing particles of all applicable sizes, either suspended in a gas or attached to a surface. Cleanroom environments are required if particle contamination is a concern, as is the case, for example, in semiconductor manufacturing.

Recently there has been more attention to the cultural aspects of social robots. This chapter contributes to this effort by offering a philosophical, in particular Wittgensteinian framework for conceptualizing in what sense and how robots are related to culture and by exploring what it would mean to create an “Ubuntu Robot.” In addition, the chapter gestures toward a more culturally diverse and more relational approach to social robotics and emphasizes the role technology can play in addressing the challenges of modernity and in assisting cultural change: It argues that robots can help us to engage in cultural dialogue, reflect on our own culture, and change how we do things. In this way, the chapter contributes to the growing literature on cross-cultural approaches to social robotics.

The population bomb

The UN has estimated world population in 1950 as being 2.5 billion people. In 2022, it had risen to 8 billion. Population growth is concentrated in low-income countries. High-income economies in Asia, such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and in Europe now have fertility rates well below the level that would maintain their existing populations.

Looking forward from 1950, would this greater than three-fold population growth have been the subject of utopian or dystopian novels and films? Would an effective United Nations after the Second World War have argued that the greatest need of the planet was for dramatic growth in the world population?

William Morris is now primarily known as a Victorian-era wallpaper designer, employing the classic forms of arts and crafts in flowing leaves and designs of natural foliage. He was also a socialist. His 1892 book, News from Nowhere, represents a particular agrarian view of socialist life. Fundamental to this lifestyle was an emphasis upon crafts, but also upon a severe diminution of London's population to return to a city of villages. If that was the case in 1891, surely it held with greater impetus in 1950 and in 2000.

In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb on the dangers of over-populating the Earth, and the Zero Population Growth movement grew over the 1970s. Yet the world population has doubled from roughly 4 billion in 1970 to roughly 8 billion today. GDP per capita is measured as over $60,000 in the US, $5,000 in South Africa and $500 in Afghanistan. It does not seem unduly naive to suggest that international development efforts and policies in countries concerned about the well-being of their future populations might have been better directed at increases in output per capita than dividing output and the natural environment across an expanding population.

China of course did exactly that with the one-child policy introduced in 1980. GDP per capita was $194.80 in 1980 (according to the World Bank) and achieved $12,556.30 in 2021. India did not follow that policy and is now projected to have overtaken China in population. India GDP per capita was $267.40 in 1980 and $2,256.60 in 2021. For those of us who believe in democracy, something has gone seriously wrong. India (China) population in 1980 was 696.8 million (981.2 million) and in 2021 was 1.41 billion (1.41 billion).

This chapter covers:

1. • The influence of the media on human–robot interaction (HRI) research;

2. • Stereotypes of robots in the media;

3. • Positive and negative visions of HRI;

4. • Ethical considerations when designing an HRI study;

5. • Ethical issues of robots that fulfill a user’s emotional needs;

6. • The dilemmas associated with behavior toward robots (e.g., robots’ right to be treated in a moral way);

7. • The issue of job losses as a result of the increasing number of robots in the workforce.

Although the vast majority of mobile robotic systems involve a single robot operating alone in its environment, a growing number of researchers are considering the challenges and potential advantages of having a group of robots cooperate in order to complete some required task. For some specific robotic tasks, such as exploring an unknown planet [374], search and rescue [812], pushing objects [608], [513], [687], [821], or cleaning up toxic waste [609], it has been suggested that rather than send one very complex robot to perform the task it would more effective to send a number of smaller, simpler robots.

This chapter lays out a transactional technique by which any existing natural or legal person can create an autonomous organization – specifically, an LLC with zero members controlled, as a matter of internal governance, only by software. The technique works under existing law and can be used with software without regard for the software’s “intelligence.”

The rule of law is the epitome of anthropocentrism: humans are the primary subject and object of norms that are created, interpreted, and enforced by humans – made manifest in government of the people, by the people, for the people. Though legal constructs such as corporations may have rights and obligations, these in turn are traceable back to human agency in their acts of creation, their daily conduct overseen to varying degrees by human agents. Even international law, which governs relations among states, begins its foundational text with the words ‘We the peoples…’. The emergence of fast, autonomous, and opaque AI systems forces us to question this assumption of our own centrality, though it is not yet time to relinquish it.

In the mid-1970s, Marshall McLuhan proposed to revisit his foundational text, Understanding Media, in order to address the generation that had experienced the transition from visual space to acoustic space—from the space produced by print media to the space produced by electronic media. Whereas visual space was abstracting, monological and eye-bound, argued McLuhan, acoustic space was involving, dialogical and multi-sensual. What, asked McLuhan, were the implications of this massive shift? The question is no less pertinent now that the move into the electronic regime has advanced so considerably, with the spatial element having become crucial to an understanding of ubiquitous communications.

Philip Marchand writes in his biography that ‘McLuhan's never-ending search for collaborators found him working in 1979 with Bruce Powers, a professor of communications for Niagara University. […] Powers was knowledgeable about new information technologies such as fiber optics and microwave transmissions; […] together the two planned to write a book called The Social Impact of New Technologies’ (Marshall McLuhan, p. 266). That book was not completed because McLuhan suffered a severe stroke in late September, 1979, which left him unable to speak, read or write (Marchand, p. 270), but in 1989, Powers published The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, a compilation of McLuhan's writing, and of dialogues between McLuhan and Powers. In the book that McLuhan had been planning, he had not been proposing to revise substantively the media theory he had put forward in Understanding Media. He was, in fact, refining these theories as the tetradic Laws of Media, which were published posthumously in 1988. Rather, writes Powers, ‘McLuhan, in his final years, wanted to talk to a new generation, one which was twenty to twenty-five years beyond Understanding Media (1964) […] [and] […] in the grasp of a vast material and psychic shift between the values of linear thinking, of visual, proportional space, and that of the values of the multi-sensory life, the experience of acoustic space’ (GV, p. ix). Powers states that McLuhan sought to develop the implications of the notion that ‘the extensions of human consciousness were projecting themselves into [a] total world environment via electronics’ (p. vii).

Although many mobile robot systems are experimental in nature, systems devoted to specific practical applications are being developed and deployed. This chapter examines some of the tasks for which mobile robotic systems are beginning to appear and describes several existing experimental and production systems that have been developed. As noted in Chapter 1, tasks for which practical mobile robot systems exist are usually characterized by one or more of the following properties:

• The environment is inhospitable, and sending a human is either very costly or very dangerous. Such environments include nuclear, chemical, underwater, battlefield and outer-space environments.

• The environment is remote, so that sending a human operator is too difficult or takes too long. Extreme instances of this are those environments that are completely inaccessible to humans, such as microscopic environments. Many other environments, including mining, outer space, and forestry exhibit these properties.

• The task has a very demanding duty cycle or a very high fatigue factor.

• The task is highly disagreeable to a human.

In addition, domains where the use of a robot may improve efficiency, robustness, or safety are candidates for the development of experimental systems that may subsequently become practical.

Fundamentally, the decision to implement a robotic solution to a given task often comes down to a question of economics. If it is cheaper, more efficient, or simpler to use a person to accomplish a task, then economically it does not make much sense to design and use a robot.

Introduction

You may be wondering what a chapter on robotics and ethics is doing in a book on computer ethics. Simply put, robotics today is heavily dependent upon artificial intelligence, and artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science. I would feel I was short-changing the reader if I had not included this chapter.

The Roboethics Roadmap, a product of the European Robotics Research Network (EURON), begins with the following statement: “We can forecast that in the XXI century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with – robots.” EURON is a group that aims to promote excellence in robotics by creating resources and exchanging knowledge, as well as looking to the future. Its objectives are research coordination, a joint program of research, education and training, industrial links, and dissemination. It is clear from the quoted statement that EURON is serious about looking to the future through a multinational approach that will prepare for the advent of the relationship between humans and intelligent robots.

A major product of EURON is a robotics research roadmap that is meant to investigate opportunities for developing and employing robot technology over the next twenty years. The first release of this roadmap took place in July of 2006. More than fifty people who produced it had participated in previous activities on robotics, possessed a cross-cultural attitude, and were interested in applied ethics.

Robotics refers to the study and use of robots (Nof, 1999). Likewise, industrial robotics refers to the study and use of robots for manufacturing where industrial robots are essential components in an automated manufacturing environment. Similarly, industrial robotics for electronics manufacturing, in particular semiconductor, hard disk, flat panel display (FPD), and solar manufacturing refers to robot technology used for automating typical cleanroom applications. This chapter reviews the evolution of industrial robots and some common robot types, and builds a foundation for Chapter 2, which introduces cleanroom robotics as an engineering discipline within the broader context of industrial robotics.

History of industrial robotics

Visions and inventions of robots can be traced back to ancient Greece. In about 322 BC the philosopher Aristotle wrote: “If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it, then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.” Aristotle seems to hint at the comfort such ‘tools’ could provide to humans. In 1495 Leonardo da Vinci designed a mechanical device that resembled an armored knight, whose internal mechanisms were designed to move the device as if controlled by a real person hidden inside the structure. In medieval times machines like Leonardo's were built for the amusement of affluent audiences. The term ‘robot’ was introduced centuries later by the Czech writer Karel Capek in his play R. U. R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), premiered in Prague in 1921.