The level of autonomy and the generation of membership constitute useful information for identifying a type of robot, but not for describing its operation and, consequently, its usefulness in carrying out certain purposes robot kits for adults.
In fact, robots are conventionally made up of four functional units , or structures, which working in synergy are able to guarantee the correct operation of systems capable of reaching very high levels of complexity. The functional units of the robots are:
mechanical structure : includes the devices that allow the robot to perform operations from a fixed location, rather than moving in space. This is the case with the sequences of arms and nodes that make up the body of the robot. One of the simplest cases is characterized by the robotic arm, which has a fixed base from which the articulated elements are articulated, in correspondence with which an end effector is placed, useful for carrying out a specific operation.
sensory structure : it includes a sensor system capable of detecting data from the environmental context to transmit them to a government structure equipped with computational units. There are many types of sensors, including proprioceptive sensors, responsible for the perception of the state of one’s own mechanical structure, rather than exteroceptive sensors, which deal with perceiving the surrounding external environment.
control structure : includes a system of actuators that activate the robot to carry out the planned operations. The control structure is therefore composed of components capable of connecting perception with action, such as motors and pneumatic systems, in addition to the control algorithms that manage the actuators themselves.
governance structure : in its minimum configuration it includes the data storage and computation systems, useful for programming, calculating and verifying the robot’s activities. The governance structure usually coincides with the IT equipment, consisting of the hardware and software necessary for the operation of the machine (operating system, drivers, development environments and application software).
The degrees of freedom of robots
Among the properties of the mechanical system we find the degrees of freedom, which express the level of technological complexity of a robot as regards its movements . This is a topic usually associated with kinematics, due to the fact that a robot is defined in physics as an open kinematic chain of rigid bodies connected by joints, which in turn can be prismatic in nature, when they allow translation, rather than rotoidal.
