Suppose you want to prepare a bowl of cereal for yourself. You need to know quite a bit of information – that you need a bowl, that you need a particular something to put in the bowl, that you need a spoon or other tool to bring the contents of the bowl to your mouth.
You also need some specific abilities — like the ability to reach for an object, to grasp and hold the object, to change the angle of the object, and so forth. None of these abilities would benefit you, however, if you weren’t able to see objects in the environment, determine their location, and sense their presence after you pick them up. Each bit of information, each task, and each ability represents a problem for roboticists to solve. How are they doing it? By developing artificial intelligence (AI), sensors, and actuators. These are the parts of a robot that make everything happen.
