Welcome to the very first lecture in our online course, Introduction to Robotics. My name is Peter Cooke and I'll be your lecturer for the next six weeks. So this is a really quick run through, if you like, the fictional underpinnings of robotics.
What we're going to do in this first course is look at the great variety of robots that exist today. And we're going to start off with manufacturing robots. These are the arm type robots that you see working in factories, building cars. building computers and so on. Very, very important class of robots.
And that's the type of robot we're going to study most carefully in this Introduction to Robotics course. But in this particular lecture, I want to paint the big picture of the different types of robots that are in the world today. So we're going to look at robots that drive, robots that fly, robots that swim underneath the water, or robots that paddle around on the surface of the water, effectively robotic boats.
So this first lecture, we're going to orient ourselves and learn about the big spread of robotics and then for the remainder of the course we're going to knuckle down and look at arm type robots in particular.