Word: robots
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Another function which enhances the robot's utility, according to its creators, is its ability to perform a series of movements on its own through the use of its ultrasonic sensors. These sensors are in the form of strips on the side panels that send signals back to the computer's Central Processing Unit of the main computer in case the robot--or in this case the vacuum cleaner--bumps into an object on the floor that it must evade...
More important is the mechanism which actually steers the robot, a camera which sends out a signal and gets reflections from objects back--in the same way a radar does--and adjusts its direction accordingly, Jury says...
This "sensory" function is what makes the robot unique, according to Jury. In general, robots are "open--loop robots" that go to a specific point and perform a specific function...
Stanford University's Science Department developed a robot with visual--and not sonar--capacity: a camera on the robot takes pictures of a room and changes direction according to the pictures, visually "mapping out" the room. But this robot "is too expensive and takes eight hours to get across a single room because of its process of taking pictures and then programming," says Jury...
...over again we could make it half the size. Conceivably, we could go to a computer company and give them the design of the entire board (the main mechanism in the robot, about two square feet in size), and they could put it all on a single chip," says Jury...