Six Uses Of Robots You May Not Have Known

Uses Of Robots

How many times would you say that a robot had some influence on your life during the last seven days? Unless you have a robot vacuum cleaner, you probably think it did not influence your day-to-day life; Nothing is further from reality. We are going to do a review of how robots are existence used right now. You probably didn’t even know about these uses.

Table of Contents

What is a Robot?

Before we begin, we have to clarify what precisely a robot is. While there is no official definition of its constituent characteristics, many robotics experts, like myself, describe it as a machine that moves or has moving parts and makes simple decisions while interacting with the world.

So the vacuum that you program to do your job when you’re away is a robot, sensing the world around you and making decisions while sucking up and sweeping up the dirt.

On the contrary, the washing machine is not a robot. You choose the program to tell you how you want to wash your clothes, and the appliance gets to do it without interacting with the outside. As we can see, the concept is ambiguous, and no definition pleases everyone. But let’s leave it here and go back to last week.

Robots That Separate Food

When eating a bowl of rice, remember that a robotic machine selected each grain you eat with an ultra-fast vision system. And it is that the tools that different foods such as rice are miracles of automation whose existence most people ignore. Many of them will even think that the rice grows uniformly in shape and colour as it remains present in the packages they buy in the supermarket, but it is not like that.

Each grain of rice goes through a robotic machine that uses high-speed cameras, lights, and a computer that analyzes the image of each grain. Based on which a decision is made: depending on the thickness of the grain, they remain turned on and off powerful air currents to direct it to the correct container. This process takes place hundreds of times per second.

But rice is not the only food that robots can separate. The market for machines that classify food is growing by leaps and bounds: they can separate wheat, legumes, and seeds.

Robots For Healthcare Practice

Have you seen a healthcare professional in the past week? You must have realized immediately whether it was a human or a robot. Most likely, it was the former. But did you know that many nurses, doctors, and EMTs practice robot patients?

These peculiar patients can simulate various diseases and provide students with the possibility of offering diagnoses and treatments before doing it with real people. These robots are to medicine what flight simulators are to trainee pilots.

Some of the robots for healthcare use are life-size and look like a natural person, while others serve a specific specialty and may represent only a part of the human body.

Robots For Police Training

Have you ever been taken hostage in an armed robbery? Hopefully not. But if the answer is yes again and the police came to their aid, it is possible that the snipers who aimed a red laser at the criminals remained trained using robots.

The Sydney-based company Marathon Targets markets a range of highly mobile robots that can withstand shots from police and military trainees. These machines are armored for apparent reasons and can substitute people (targets) during live-fire training.

Robots For The Extraction Of Poison

Have you ever taken medication? If the medicine you took remained intended to prevent malaria or suppress your immune system, the drug companies might have used scorpion venom as an ingredient.

Extracting venom from a scorpion is a dangerous task for a person. However, for a robot, it is the perfect job.

Robots Exploring The Sewers

You have ever used the bathroom, right? Wow, I hope so. The truth is that we do not usually think regularly about the sewage system, but when it does not do its job correctly, we find out right away.

Inspection and Sewer maintenance is more critical than ever. The fatbergs (mass fat frozen) and all types of hygiene products that let it run down the toilet and cause blockages in pipes have become a significant problem level in many cities worldwide. Fortunately, the workers have the collaboration of robots that facilitate their cumbersome tasks.

Robots And Shopping

Surely more than once, you have gone shopping or bought online. But perhaps you did not know that many of the products you consume remain moved by robots from their place of manufacture to the establishment where you purchase them.

Some container ports have been partially automated. At the terminals, operators (humans) unload the vast containers from the ships employing cranes.

However, from then on, the containers are handled by substantial robotic wheeled cranes called straddle carriers. Containers are moved throughout the port, stacked, re-stacked, and automatically loaded onto trucks transporting them by road.

Mobile robots also operate numerous warehouses. The best-known example of warehouse automation can remain found on Amazon. The giant distributor designed many of its warehouses so that the machines could transport entire racks autonomously.

The importance of robots in the success of Amazon is such that in 2012 the American company took over the robotics company that manufactured them for 775 million dollars.