Contains the full lesson along with a supporting toolkit, including teachers’ notes.
Boston Scientific manufactures medical devices such as pacemakers, defibrillators, catheters and stents. The production environment must be tightly controlled, clean and free of any contamination. Machines such as robots can operate with great precision and consistency without requiring interaction with humans or other sources of contamination. In this lesson we look at the general field of technology called robotics which deals with the design, construction and use of robots.
What is a robot?
A robot is a machine that mimics the movements or behaviour of a living being, most often a human. It is a method of automation. Standard automation addresses a process and performs it automatically. Robotics takes the movement of limbs and functions of the senses and replicates these. The concept of robots goes back a long way. Engineers and inventors from ancient civilisations, including Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Ptolemaic Egypt, attempted to build self-operating machines, some resembling animals and humans. About 1495 Leonardo da Vinci designed a robotic knight that could sit up, wave its arms, and move its head and jaw. In 1926, Westinghouse Electric Corporation created Televox, the first robot put to useful work. The word robot was introduced by the Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in 1920.
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