6.

Automated and emerging technologies

Automated systems
- A combination of software and hardware that is designed and programmed to work
automatically without the need of any human intervention

Types of sensors
- Temperature
- Moisture
- Humidity
- Light
- Infrared
- Pressure
- Acoustic
- Gas
- pH
- Magnetic field
- Accelerator
- Proximity
- Flow
- Level

Robotics
- A branch of computer science that brings together design, construction and operation of
robots

Robots in factories
- Welding parts together
- Spray-painting panels on a car
- Fitting windscreens to cars
- Cutting out metal parts to a high precision
- Bottling and labelling plants
- Warehouses (automatic location of items)

Robots at home
- Autonomous floor sweepers
- Autonomous lawn mower
- Ironing robots
- Pool cleaning
- Automatic window cleaners
- Entertainment (‘friend’ robots)

Drones
- Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are drones that are either remotely controlled or totally
autonomous (using embedded systems)
- Taking aerial photographs
 - Make parcel delivers

Characteristics of a robot
- Ability to sense their surroundings
- Sensors
- Allow a robot to recognize its immediate environment and gives it the ability
to determine things like size, shape or weight of an object, detect if
something is hot or cold
- All sensor data is sent to a microprocessor or computer.
- Have a degree of movement
- They can make use of wheels, cogs, pistons, gears (etc.)
- to carry out functions such as turning, twisting, moving backwards/forwards,
gripping or lifting
- They are mechanical structures made up of many parts (for example, motors,
hydraulic pipes, actuators and circuit boards)
- They contain many electrical components to allow them to function
- Can make use of end effectors (different attachments to allow them to carry
out specific tasks such as welding, spraying, cutting or lifting).
- Programmable
- They have a ‘brain’ known as a controller that determines the action to be taken to
perform a certain task (the controller relies on data sent from sensors or cameras, for
example)
- Controllers are programmable to allow the robots to do certain tasks.

Hardware Robots vs. “Software Robots”

- Search engine bots or WebCrawlers (these ‘robots’ roam the internet scanning websites,
categorising them for search purposes).
- Chat bots (these are programs that pop up on websites that seem to enter some form of
conversation with the web user).

Dependent vs. Independent Robots

Independent robots:
- Have no direct human control (they are said to be autonomous, for example, an autonomous
vehicle)
- Can replace human activity totally (no human interaction is required for the robot to function
fully).
Dependent robots:
- Have a human who is interfacing directly with the robot (the human interface may be a
computer or a control panel)
- Can supplement, rather than totally replace, human activity (for example, in a car assembly
plant where both humans and robots work together to produce a car).

Robots in agriculture
- Harvesting and picking of vegetable and fruits
- Labour-intensive
 - Much faster and accurate
- Higher yields and reduced wastes
- Weed Control
- Distinguish between weed and crops
- Phenotyping
- The process of observing physical characteristics of a plant in order to assess its
health and growth
- Sensors - Spectral + thermal cameras
- Machine learning
- Seed-planting drones and fertiliser distribution
- Produce an aerial image of a farm sending back a ‘bird’ eye view’ of the crops and
land
- More accurately and efficiently
- Reduce waste
- Increase coverage

Advantages

- Industry
- Capable of working in conditions that may be hazardous to humans
- Works 24/7 without a stop
- Less expensive in the long run
- More productive than humans
- More consistent
- Repetitive tasks
- Less cost in heating and lighting
- Transport
- Human error is removed → fewer accidents
- Better for environment → more efficient
- Reduced traffic congestion
- Reduced time travelled
- Increased lane capacity
- Stress-free parking
- Reduced running cost
- Medicine
- Domestic use
- Entertainment

Disadvantages

- Industry
- Difficult to do nonstandard tasks
- Higher unemployment rates
- Deskilling
- Move to places where operation costs are low
 - Expensive to build and set up in the first place
- Transport
- Very expensive system to set up
- Fear of hacking into the vehicle system
- Security and safety issues (glitches)
- Well Maintained (blizzards)
- Driver and passengers are reluctant to use the new technologies
- Unemployment
- Emergency situations(plane)
- Medicine
- Domestic use
- Entertainment

Artificial Intelligence
- a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent human behaviour by a
computer
- collection of rules and data, and the ability to reason, learn and adapt to external
stimuli.
- reasoning is the ability to draw reasoned conclusions based on given data/situations
Narrow AI
- A machine has superior performance when doing one specific task

General AI
- A machine is similar in its performance to a human doing a specific task

Strong AI
- A machine superior performance to a human in many tasks

Expert systems
- Developed to mimic human knowledge and experiences
- Use knowledge and inference to solve problems or answer questions that would
normally require a human expert
- User interface
- yes/no questions
- Interaction method with user
- Inference engine
- Main processing element
- Acts like a search engine
- Makes use of inference rules in the rules base
- Gathering information from the user by asking a series of questions and applying
responses where necessary
- Knowledge base
- Collection of objects and attributes
- Rules base
- Set of inference rules
- Used by the inference engine to draw conclusions
 - Logical thinking

Applications
- Oil and mineral prospecting
- Diagnosis of a patient’s illness
- Fault diagnosis in mechanical and electronic equipment
- Tax and financial calculation
- Strategy games
- Identification
- Plants animals chemical and biological compounds

Advantages
- High level of expertise
- High accuracy
- Results are consistent
- Ability to store vast amounts of ideas and facts
- Traceable logical solutions
- Possible for an expert system to have multiple expertise
- Very fast response time
- Unbiased reporting and analysis of facts
- Indicate the probability of any suggested solution being correct

Disadvantages
- Need considerable training
- The set up and maintenance fee is high
- ‘Very cold’ responses
- Only as good as the information and facts entered
- User sometimes make the very dangerous assumptions

Machine Learning
- algorithms are ‘trained’ and learn from their past experiences and examples.
- systems make predictions or even make decisions based on previous scenarios.
 - offer fast and accurate outcomes due to very powerful processing capability.
- ability to manage and analyse considerable volumes of complex data
- Some of the tasks would take humans years to complete without the help of
machine learning techniques.

Real-World Examples of Machine Learning (ML)

- Facial recognition.
- Product recommendations.
- Email automation and spam filtering.
- Financial accuracy.
- Social media optimization.
- Healthcare advancement.
- Mobile voice to text and predictive text.
- Predictive analytics.