When you think of “robotics,” the first thing that comes to mind is cutting-edge modern technology. It is also frequently imagined as a mechanical system that can perform amazing feats and takes the form of a person, thanks to science fiction films. All of this is true, yet a robot may just be a software system operating on a desktop computer rather than a real machine.
As you may be aware, developing a robot may easily involve a wide range of scientific disciplines, making it an extremely complicated system. We will just focus on one of these numerous fields: Machine learning. Both machine learning and robotics first gained popularity in the 1950s. Since then, these technologies have evolved into larger and more sophisticated disciplines.
One thing is synonymous with the two: automation. The term “automation” refers to the process of significantly reducing human interaction and involvement in tasks. Machine learning models are created to learn from datasets and then automate future operations without the need for human intervention. Robots, on the other hand, are taught human behaviors or built to mimic actions in order to do tasks without the need for human participation.
Robots, as previously stated, can be either physical machines or software systems. They must keep the characteristics of automation in both circumstances. Siri, for example, is a software system that operates on a device, as a software application. However, because it is classified as a robot, it is capable of doing tasks when instructed to do so without the need for human intervention.
If you create a model to predict the price of a property and then deploy it as a web application, users can enter the details of a house and then click on a predict button to see a predicted price. Will you refer to it as a robot? You could be experiencing doubts, but hang in there. What if a large real estate business decided to take the model established for forecasting houses and incorporate it into a humanoid robot, allowing it to simply speak the price aloud when people give it the qualities of a house? Machine learning is used in both applications to accomplish the same goal. One is working on automation in a web app, while the other is working on software within a human-like computer (humanoid robot).
Robotic concepts aren’t restricted to a single form. It is diversified, just like many other areas of computer science. It can be in the form of software programs/software robots, or it can take any physical form. Dogs, birds, humans, and other animals in boxes, balls or any shape form are just a few examples. It is acceptable to name a system robot if it can carry out tasks on its own without being directed on what to do in changing settings.
A robot could simply be a deployed machine learning algorithm from the standpoint of machine learning. It is deployed to stand alone in a mechanically programmed physical machine, rather than being embedded in a PC operating system as software or an app, or hosted online as a web application with flask. Machine learning systems can be thought of as robots.
Except in some cases, they can be deployed into dedicated standalone systems to perform. This is based on the reality that a standalone robot may contain additional intellect. For example, the real estate company’s robot could be enhanced in terms of functionality and capability.
The answer is a big No. In this light, let’s start with robots. They are some robots that are developed such that they can perform tasks with automation, on their own yet without any learning or intelligence! A car manufacturing company may develop a robot that just performs fixed repetitive tasks on its own without any learning! It does not stop it from being a robot but it does not use Machine learning. Another thing could be that the robot could have a means of taking all these variables during the repetitive tasks and making knowledge out of it in the future, thereby making it still become learned latter like a human. But if it doesn’t exhibit any form of learning, we can not call it intelligent or smart even though it is automated. This creates a good explanation for intelligence and automation. Hence, repeating tasks on its own makes it automated, while performing tasks according to the changing and unspecified scenarios make it intelligent. There is a feeling of freedom here. Automation is kind of hardwired while intelligence is free and dynamic.
This explanation shows that Machine learning has both automation and learning embedded in it while robots may lack the later. This may be why Machine learning has kept trending and gaining huge interest and investment than robotics. Hence we can call almost all Machine learning applications robots but not the other way round.
Finally, let’s define a robot as a machine that executes predetermined duties without the assistance of a person.
To balance everything, we can just use the term “machine learning robots” to smooth things out. On these grounds, watch out for a future post that delves more into how Artificial Intelligence fits into the picture of these technologies (automation and robotics), as well as Machine Learning and Robotics.
To summarize, we can say;
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