Let’s face it, Robots will eventually take over; it’s just a matter of time. They might look silly, doing some kind of funny dance, playing soccer, performing their daily pick and place routine in factories, or helping us to win or lose wars, but, their combination of artificial intelligence, neuro-biology, and computer science will make them irresistible.

In the past two thousand years people have tried to build humanoid machines, sometimes with magic (Rabbi Loew’s Golem) and sometimes with mechanics. Though the results have often looked spooky or ridiculous, they’re proof of our obsession with emulating creation.  These days, humanoid robots have become just a small facet of robot science, but they remain intriguing and seductive.

Robert Lippok’s Robot ep is a portrait of the euphoria and naivety of 20th century robot science.  Throughout the ep he uses the technology and the spirit of early 90’s techno in combination with field recordings and a sense for romantic melodies to explore and elucidate our relationship and fascination with robots.

| GLOSSARY |

Closed Loop: A programming loop that has no exit and whose execution can be interrupted only by intervention from outside the software in which the loop is included.

Pick and Place robots are used in the consumer products industry for a wide variety of product transfer applications. The machine basically takes a product or products from machines such as wrappers, cartoners or fillers, and stacks them into a case, which then is ready for palletizing or shipment.

Servo: Also servomechanism or servomotor. An automatic control mechanism consisting of a motor driven by a signal that is a function of or the difference between a commanded position and/or rate and an actual measured position or rate.

In logistics Tracking and Tracing is the concept of locating property that is being forwarded from an origin to a destination through various hubs and passing along spokes, and determining the location and other status of such object.

Zero Moment Point is a concept related with dynamics and control of legged locomotion e.g., for humanoid robots It specifies the point with respect to which dynamic reaction force at the contact of the foot with the ground does not produce any moment, i.e. the point where total inertia force equals 0 (zero). .............................