Robots Play a Large Role in Our Lives
Commentary by Eli Barlow,
May 19, 2011, page 3.....

I am a student at Lake Champlain Waldorf School doing an independent study project on autonomous robots. I chose this subject partially because I am interested in it and partially because it is so pertinent in today’s world. Robots and the products of robots can be found almost anywhere if you look, and seeing that makes you realize what large roles they play in our lives.
Autonomous robots are robots that can perform tasks and make decisions based on unstructured input. I designed, built, and programmed a robot out of an NXT lego kit that divides a deck of cards into two equal piles. This is the basic code behind that program:

b = nxt.locator.find_one_brick() #find the LEGO brick
m_left = Motor (b, PORT_B) #access the left motor (port B)
m_right = Motor(b, PORT_C) #access the right motor (port C)
i = 0 #assigns the value of 0 to i
while i < 26: #creates a loop that will only end when i is equal to or greater than 26
m_left.turn(-75, 256) #turn the left motor backwards 256 degrees with power 75
m_right.turn(-75, 256) #turn the right motor backwards 256 degrees with power 75
i = i + 1 #changes the value of i so that it will end the loop after it has been run 26 times, the number needed to sort a deck of cards

As a robot this design failed because I am faster sorting cards than it is, but as an experiment it succeeded. It succeeded because it allowed me to get a glimpse at how scientists evolve robotics.
It seems that as more robots are invented to do more complex and eccentric tasks they will become a bigger part of society. Look at the things around you and think of how each object was made. Unless you are in the wilderness wearing clothes you wove, it is likely that many of these objects were made by (or are) robots. Not just cars and computers but also the clothes you are wearing and some of the food you are eating. Robots have been used to 3-dimensionally print food (as seen on YouTube: “3-D food printer makes dessert”), and in the future that might be a common technology, just as common as the 2-D printer is now. There are millions of ways that robots could be used: to perform complex long-distance surgery, turned into humanoids with automated thought, or even nano-bots sent into the bloodstream to cure cancer (far future).
Though robots can and have been used to solve some of humanity’s major problems, they can cause problems themselves: they require energy to function and most of our energy sources degrade nature. Oil is pulled out of the ground, destroying habitat (sometimes on a mass scale such as the recent oil spill), and when the oil is burned it releases gasses that hurt the environment. The disaster involving the nuclear power plants in Japan is an example in which it was not just the environment that suffered (in the main), but also people.
Though I only learned extremely basic programming, I am still very interested in the subject and will almost definitely continue to study it outside of school. I sincerely hope that I have aroused someone else’s interest and that they will satisfy any curiosity I have created.

Eli Barlow
Eli, who lives on Spear Street, is an 8th grade student at the Lake Champlain Waldorf School. In order to fulfill the community service requirement for his independent study project, he said he “chose to write an article for The Charlotte News to increase the amount of general knowledge on this subject because this technology is used by many but understood by few.”