Question: how easy is it to make A ROBOT

Phil Sutton answered on 14 Mar 2017:

It all depends on what you want the robot to do. Some can be very easy others are so difficult we haven’t been able to successfully build them yet. By definition a robot is something that can do a task for you. So if you break that up it means you need to engineer something that can do a task and then write some computer programs that can tell it what to do. I write a lot of computer programs to use almost a virtual robot to do difficult and complicated calculations for me. This comes with experience but can take a few hours to a few weeks to write a program to do a particular task. To build a simple robot to hoover the carpet or cut the grass wouldn’t be that hard. You just need to tell it to cover a certain area and if it bumped into something to change direction. The physical part of this could just be some motors and a small computer on board along with the hoover or lawn mower parts of the robot. The real difficulty comes when we want the robots to be more human like and have artificial intelligence. It’s amazing how complicated the human body and brain is, it is something we are struggling to replicate accurately.

The good thing about robots is that they can go into dangerous places that we don’t want humans going. For example they would be ideal to send into space to explore or into nuclear reactors.