Different types of robots

Different types of robots

Industrial robots

Industrial robots are used in an industrial manufacturing environment. Usually these are articulated arms specifically developed for such applications as welding, material handling, painting and others.

Domestic or household robots

Robots used at home. This type of robots includes many quite different devices such as robotic vacuum cleaners, robotic pool cleaners, sweepers, gutter cleaners and other robots that can do different chores.

Also, some surveillance and telepresence robots could be regarded as household robots if used in that environment.

Medical robots

Robots used in medicine and medical institutions. First and foremost - surgery robots. Also, some automated guided vehicles and maybe lifting aides.

Service robots

Robots that don’t fall into other types gathering robots, robots made to show off technologies, robots used for research, etc.

Military robots

Robots used in military. This type of robots includes bomb disposal robots, different transportation robots, reconnaissance drones. Often robots initially created for military purposes can be used in law enforcement, search and rescue and other related fields.

Entertainment robots

These are robots used for entertainment. This is a very broad category. It starts with toy robots such as robosapien or the running alarm clock and ends with real heavyweights such as articulated robot arms used as motion simulators.

Space robots

This type would include robots used on the International Space Station, Canadarm that was used in Shuttles, as well as Mars rovers and other robots used in space.

Hobby and competition robots

Most of the hobbyist robots are mobile and made to operate by rolling around on wheels propelled by electric motors controlled by an on board microprocessor.

Explorer robots

The majority of these robots are completely self-reliant due to their sensory systems, however they may also be controlled by humans giving orders through computer commands.

The other types of explorer robots are underground mine exploring robots, seeing and walking undersea robots, and even bomb defusing robots used by police.

Laboratory robots

Laboratory robotics is the    act of using robots in biology or chemistry labs.

For example, pharmaceutical companies employ robots to move biological or chemical samples around to synthesize novel chemical entities or to test pharmaceutical value of existing chemical matter.

Sequence robots

A manipulator which progresses successively through the various stages of an operation according to the predetermined sequence.

Playback robots

The playback robots are capable of performing a task by teaching the position. These positions are stored in the memory, and done frequently by the robot. Generally, these playback robots are employed with a complicated control system. It can be divided into two important types, namely:

Point to Point control robots

Continuous Path control robots