What Are Robotics And Robots?

Robotics and robots together describe both the discipline concerned with designing and operating autonomous machines and the physical systems that discipline produces. A robot is a programmable mechanical device capable of sensing its environment, processing that information, and executing physical actions, with varying degrees of human supervision. Robotics covers the engineering, mathematics, and science required to build, control, and deploy such systems. The field is deeply connected to control engineering, and much of its theoretical foundation rests on feedback control, adaptive methods, and optimization.

Robots range from rigidly programmed single-arm manipulators with no environmental sensing to fully autonomous mobile platforms that navigate, perceive, and make decisions without human input. The diversity of robot types reflects the diversity of tasks they are asked to perform.

Types of Robots

Industrial robots are the most widely deployed category by installed base. Articulated arms with six or more degrees of freedom dominate automotive and electronics manufacturing. SCARA (selectively compliant assembly robot arm) robots handle high-speed planar assembly tasks, while delta robots pick and place small items at hundreds of cycles per minute. Collaborative robots (cobots) are designed to operate near human workers, using force-limited joints and speed monitoring to ensure safety in shared workspaces.

Mobile robots extend the reach of automation beyond fixed workstations. Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) navigate warehouse and factory floors using onboard mapping and obstacle avoidance, distinguishing them from older automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) that follow fixed tracks or magnetic stripes. Aerial robots (drones) carry sensors and payloads for inspection, surveying, and delivery tasks. Underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) inspect pipelines and offshore structures, while autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) follow preprogrammed missions at depths inaccessible to divers. A review of collaborative robots in industrial and service sectors published through IEEE Xplore documents how cobots are extending robot use into small and medium enterprises and service environments, beyond the traditional heavy manufacturing context.

Control Methods for Robotic Systems

The control systems governing robots span a wide range of approaches. Continuous process control and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control remain standard for joint-level regulation in well-characterized environments. Adaptive control adjusts parameters when the plant model changes, for example when a robot picks up payloads of varying mass. Fuzzy control encodes operator heuristics as linguistic rules, making it practical for systems where an analytical model is difficult to derive. Predictive control solves an optimization problem at each timestep, allowing constraints on joint velocity and actuator torque to be enforced systematically. Learning control trains policies from experience or demonstration, enabling tasks that are too complex to specify analytically.

Optimal control and optimization underpin trajectory planning for both manipulators and mobile platforms, seeking motions that minimize energy, time, or deviation from a reference while satisfying dynamic constraints.

Networked Robots and Intelligent Sensing

Modern robotics increasingly relies on networked architectures in which individual robots share sensor data, map information, and task assignments through wireless or wired communication. The Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) framework published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI defines IoRT as a dynamic network infrastructure in which robotic entities with varying degrees of autonomy exchange information via standard communication protocols, coordinating distributed perception and action. Intelligent sensors, combining raw sensing hardware with onboard processing, reduce communication bandwidth requirements by transmitting feature vectors rather than raw data. Formation control algorithms direct fleets of robots to maintain geometric configurations during collective navigation, enabling coverage and search tasks that no single robot could complete efficiently. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's publication portfolio covers networked control systems, field robotics, and robot learning across several peer-reviewed transactions.

Applications

Robotics and robots have applications in a wide range of fields, including:

• Manufacturing, where articulated and collaborative robots weld, assemble, and inspect products
• Logistics and warehousing, where AMRs transport goods across distribution centers
• Aerospace and defense, where UAVs carry out reconnaissance and inspection missions
• Marine environments, where AUVs survey the ocean floor and ROVs inspect underwater infrastructure
• Healthcare, where surgical robots and rehabilitation exoskeletons assist clinicians and patients