ScienceVerseLearning path: Robotics
The concepts to learn before Robotics, in order. Each step links to its page and, where one exists, its quiz.
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Your path
- SensorsDirect prerequisite
A sensor is the part of a measuring system that is directly affected by what is being measured — heat, light, pressure, motion — and turns that effect into a signal, usually a voltage or current, that electronics can read and digitise. Every sensor has limits: its resolution, its measurement uncertainty and the calibration that links its readings to real values. A camera's CCD, which won a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, is a grid of millions of light sensors.
- RoboticsYour goal
Robotics is the engineering of robots: machines that sense their surroundings, decide what to do with a computer, and act through motors and other actuators, with some degree of autonomy. International standard ISO 8373 defines industrial robots as reprogrammable manipulators with three or more programmable axes and service robots as robots doing useful tasks for people. NASA's Perseverance rover shows sensing, computing and acting working together on Mars.