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Robots
Systems desk
A robot is a machine that senses, decides and acts in a loop. The Systems desk treats it as an arrangement of parts, not a single clever object.
- Sense
- Estimate state
- Plan
- Act
- World
What the word covers
The word robot covers a wide range. It includes a fixed arm on a factory line, a wheeled vehicle in a warehouse and a software agent that never touches anything. The desk uses a narrow working definition. A robot senses its surroundings, chooses an action and changes those surroundings.
That definition puts the weight on the loop. The body matters less. Two machines with very different frames can share one arrangement, and two machines with similar frames can differ in how they decide. The diagram above shows the arrangement the desk has in mind.
Where the loop goes wrong
Every stage is imperfect. Sensors return readings with error. The estimate of the world's state is built from those readings and inherits the error. The plan is only as good as the estimate. The desk's note on noise and error sits beside this point. It concerns a different field, but the habit is the same. State the error source first, then judge the output.
Action closes the loop and also feeds it. A motor does not do exactly what it was told. The next reading reflects that gap. A robot that ignores this will drift from the world it believes it is in. Good design keeps the estimate honest by checking it against fresh sensing.
Where the computation runs
A second question is placement. Some stages must run on the machine, because the loop cannot wait. Others can run elsewhere, because they are slower and less urgent. Splitting work this way is a systems choice. The desk's note on hybrid execution covers a similar split in another setting. We cite it as a parallel, not as evidence about robots.
The desk's view is that the useful questions about any robot are plain ones. What does it sense? How wrong can that be? Which stage runs where? What happens when a stage fails? Answers to those say more than a description of its shape. The wider catalogue is on the portfolio page.
Finding from this desk
The desk's position is that a robot is best described by its loop, sensing, estimating, planning and acting, and by where each stage runs. This is a framing, not a measured result.