Types of robots
What you’ll learn
- The main families of robots
- How a robot’s job decides its shape
- What autonomous, semi-autonomous and teleoperated mean
Robot families
| Type | How it moves | Real examples | Good at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wheeled mobile robot | Wheels or tracks | Robot vacuum, warehouse robot, Mars rover | Moving efficiently on flat ground |
| Robot arm (manipulator) | Joints that rotate or slide | Car-factory welding arm | Precise, repeated movements in one place |
| Legged robot | 2, 4 or 6 legs | Robot dogs, humanoids | Stairs and rough ground |
| Aerial robot (drone) | Propellers | Delivery and inspection drones | Reaching high or far places fast |
| Underwater robot | Thrusters | Ocean-floor explorers | Places divers can’t safely go |
| Humanoid | Legs and arms like a person | Research and factory humanoids | Working in spaces built for people |
| Soft robot | Flexible materials, air pressure | Soft grippers for fruit | Handling delicate objects |
The beginner projects in this course are wheeled mobile robots and a small robot arm. They’re cheap, safe, and teach every core skill.
Form follows function
Engineers pick a robot’s shape for its job:
- Picking strawberries? Needs a soft gripper and a camera.
- Inspecting a pipe? Needs to be thin and maybe crawl like a snake.
- Moving boxes in a warehouse? Wheels are faster and cheaper than legs.
How much does the robot decide?
- Teleoperated: a human controls every move (a bomb-disposal robot driven by remote).
- Semi-autonomous: the robot handles some things itself, and a human gives higher-level commands (a surgical robot that steadies the doctor’s hand).
- Fully autonomous: the robot senses and decides everything (a robot vacuum).
Example: one job, three designs
Job: carry a parcel 2 km across a town.
| Design | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery drone | Fast, ignores traffic | Short battery life, weather, small payload |
| Six-wheeled sidewalk robot | Cheap, carries more, long battery life | Slow, can’t climb steps |
| Legged robot | Handles stairs and kerbs | Expensive, complex, uses lots of energy |
There’s no single “best” robot. Engineers pick the design whose strengths match the job.
Example: how much the robot decides
| Robot | Level |
|---|---|
| Bomb-disposal robot | Teleoperated: an operator drives it by camera |
| Car with lane-keeping assist | Semi-autonomous: the car steers, the driver stays in charge |
| Warehouse shelf robot | Fully autonomous: follows floor markers and plans its own routes |
Try it
Pick a job (cleaning windows, delivering pizza, searching a collapsed building). Sketch a robot for it and label its sensors, actuators and how it moves. Explain why you chose that shape.
Name the familyEasy
Which robot family is each: a car-factory welder, a quadcopter, a robot dog, a pool-cleaning robot? Robot arm, aerial robot (drone), legged robot, underwater (or wheeled) mobile robot.
Stairs in a hospitalMedium
A hospital wants a robot that carries medicine between floors. Suggest a design and explain the choice. A wheeled mobile robot that uses the lifts (it calls them over Wi-Fi). Wheels are simpler, quieter and cheaper than legs, and lifts already solve the stairs problem.
Choose the autonomy levelHard
For a robot that searches collapsed buildings, would you choose teleoperated, semi-autonomous or fully autonomous? Justify it. Semi-autonomous. The robot should keep its balance and avoid falling on its own (radio links fail underground), but a human should decide where to search and confirm when a person is found.
Quick check
Finished this lesson?