🤖 Robots and AI

A robot is a machine that can sense the world around it, decide what to do, and then move or act on its own. It follows a program written by people, but it can react to what it detects, like a robot vacuum turning when it bumps a wall. Not every machine is a robot, only ones that sense and act.

Robots use sensors, which are like electronic senses, to find out what is around them. Cameras act as eyes, microphones as ears, and touch sensors feel bumps, while some robots even measure distance with beams of light. The robot turns all these signals into information it can act on.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a computer program that can do tasks that usually need human-like thinking, such as recognising a face or understanding a question. It does not truly think or feel, but it spots patterns from huge amounts of examples and uses them to make smart guesses. People build it and decide how it is used.

Some computer programs learn by looking at thousands of examples instead of being told every rule. To learn what a cat looks like, a program studies many cat pictures until it spots the patterns they share. Then it can guess whether a new picture shows a cat. The more good examples it sees, the better it gets.