Robot combatRobot combat is a mode of robot competition in which custom-built machines fight using various methods to incapacitate each other. The machines have generally been remote-controlled vehicles rather than autonomous robots. Robot combat competitions have been made into television series, including Robot Wars in the UK and BattleBots in the US. These shows were originally broadcast in the late 1990s to early 2000s and experienced revivals in the mid-2010s.
HumanoidA humanoid (ˈhjuːmənɔɪd; from English human and -oid "resembling") is a non-human entity with human form or characteristics. The earliest recorded use of the term, in 1870, referred to indigenous peoples in areas colonized by Europeans. By the 20th century, the term came to describe fossils which were morphologically similar, but not identical, to those of the human skeleton. Although this usage was common in the sciences for much of the 20th century, it is now considered rare.
Industrial robotAn industrial robot is a robot system used for manufacturing. Industrial robots are automated, programmable and capable of movement on three or more axes. Typical applications of robots include welding, painting, assembly, disassembly, pick and place for printed circuit boards, packaging and labeling, palletizing, product inspection, and testing; all accomplished with high endurance, speed, and precision. They can assist in material handling.
Normal distributionIn statistics, a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a type of continuous probability distribution for a real-valued random variable. The general form of its probability density function is The parameter is the mean or expectation of the distribution (and also its median and mode), while the parameter is its standard deviation. The variance of the distribution is . A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed, and is called a normal deviate.
Ratio distributionA ratio distribution (also known as a quotient distribution) is a probability distribution constructed as the distribution of the ratio of random variables having two other known distributions. Given two (usually independent) random variables X and Y, the distribution of the random variable Z that is formed as the ratio Z = X/Y is a ratio distribution. An example is the Cauchy distribution (also called the normal ratio distribution), which comes about as the ratio of two normally distributed variables with zero mean.
Autonomous robotAn autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. The first autonomous robots environment were known as Elmer and Elsie, which were constructed in the late 1940s by W. Grey Walter. They were the first robots in history that were programmed to "think" the way biological brains do and meant to have free will. Elmer and Elsie were often labeled as tortoises because of how they were shaped and the manner in which they moved. They were capable of phototaxis which is the movement that occurs in response to light stimulus.
Motion planningMotion planning, also path planning (also known as the navigation problem or the piano mover's problem) is a computational problem to find a sequence of valid configurations that moves the object from the source to destination. The term is used in computational geometry, computer animation, robotics and computer games. For example, consider navigating a mobile robot inside a building to a distant waypoint. It should execute this task while avoiding walls and not falling down stairs.
Robot kinematicsIn robotics, robot kinematics applies geometry to the study of the movement of multi-degree of freedom kinematic chains that form the structure of robotic systems. The emphasis on geometry means that the links of the robot are modeled as rigid bodies and its joints are assumed to provide pure rotation or translation. Robot kinematics studies the relationship between the dimensions and connectivity of kinematic chains and the position, velocity and acceleration of each of the links in the robotic system, in order to plan and control movement and to compute actuator forces and torques.
Joint probability distributionGiven two random variables that are defined on the same probability space, the joint probability distribution is the corresponding probability distribution on all possible pairs of outputs. The joint distribution can just as well be considered for any given number of random variables. The joint distribution encodes the marginal distributions, i.e. the distributions of each of the individual random variables. It also encodes the conditional probability distributions, which deal with how the outputs of one random variable are distributed when given information on the outputs of the other random variable(s).
Maximum entropy probability distributionIn statistics and information theory, a maximum entropy probability distribution has entropy that is at least as great as that of all other members of a specified class of probability distributions. According to the principle of maximum entropy, if nothing is known about a distribution except that it belongs to a certain class (usually defined in terms of specified properties or measures), then the distribution with the largest entropy should be chosen as the least-informative default.
