Robot Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Robot - Essay Example Since then, due to the immense technological development, robots are capable of interacting with people and being involved in various aspects of modern life. Robots have significantly affected the industry technology, involving in both mechanical and medicinal aspects, integrated themselves in society and had ambiguous effects on the protection of the environment. Effects on Industrial development The first aspect that robots involved heavily is the industrial development, facilitating great innovations and successfully replacing human help. After the inception of robots during the 1950’s, the process of using robots as industrial tools was proposed by George Davol and Joseph Engelberger. The first industrial robots manufacturing company named â€Å"Unimate† was made and in 1959, the first industrial robot prototype was made. After the Unimate concept received great interest from companies in Japan, the General Motor automobile factory installed the first Unimate robot in order to serve the assembly line (Engelberger, 2007). The subsequent acquisition of the technology by the Japanese Kawasaki factory marked the development of the first robotic association J.I.R.A (Japanese Industrial Robot Association) in 1971, setting a new milestone for the industrial robot technology. New emerging technologies were implemented to facilitate better control of robots and accelerate production. The positive and negative impacts in the mechanical and medical fields are discussed below. Mechanical involvement Introducing robots in manufacturing companies had a significant advantage both for the companies and the workers. Robots were able to perform repeated and boring tasks for longer periods compared to workers while not needing expensive healthcare insurances and didn’t get sick (Henderson, 2006). This improved many aspects of manufacturing process such as improvement of product quality, avoidance of hazardous accidents by the more precise directions i n dangerous tasks and increased productivity while keeping manufacturing costs low. On the other hand, while small companies were benefited from opening new trade perspectives such as selling specialized equipment, most small businesses that could not afford the new technology were led to foreclosure. In workers, while it was originally feared that jobs could be destroyed by replacing human labour with machines, it was later proved that this had a strongly positive impact on improving the working conditions because robots replaced jobs that were dangerous or toxic to humans. An example of this is the robot ANATROLLER ARI-100 which was developed to clean toxic environments. The requirement of maintenance and supervision for the machines opened up new opportunities for work which had a better working life and benefits for workers. The only negative social impact is the replacement of uneducated workers or workers with limited skills, as they could only perform repeated tasks, which st ill exists until today. Medical involvement When robots were introduced to the medical sector, the first robot-assisted surgery was facilitated in 1985, with PUMA 520 performing a neurological biopsy. As doctors learned to operate the machines better, major operations were made possible by only a few incisions by the robots. The patients benefited from less trauma, decreased healing time and faster release from