• Question: what is the most complicated part of building a robot?

    Asked by Xhan on 14 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 14 Mar 2017:


      Debugging (i.e. making the robot actually work). This is the most common reason the robots are not delivered to me on time 🙂

      This is usually the case because robots need precise instructions in specific languages for them to understand what you want. And it’s not easy to translate something complex into those precise terms.

      “Make me a cup of tea” for example, would be simple task for a human, but robots need hundreds of lines of code to make that happen. They need to know exactly how to move their hands and legs, where the tea, the cup and the kettle all are.

      Then they need to figure out how to pour water into the cup, so that it doesn’t splash, when to stop, and how to add tea to the cup as well.

      They also need to know how to hold a cup, so that it gets to you in tact, find where you are, and deliver the cup itself.

      Every one of these steps requires extensive work, and making sure that all of them work exactly as you intend can be a nightmare 🙂

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