Robotics

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a business automation technology that utilizes software "bots" to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting with digital systems to execute a business process. These bots are configured to capture and interpret applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems, all by interacting with the graphical user interface (GUI) rather than through deeper system-level integration. Unlike physical robots, RPA bots are software programs that operate on a computer, automating high-volume, repetitive, and rule-based tasks to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and free up human employees for more complex, value-added work.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems is an interdisciplinary field that integrates computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering to design and operate intelligent machines that can perform tasks without direct human control. It focuses on developing the core computational components that enable a system to perceive its environment through sensors, plan a course of action to achieve a goal, and control its physical actuators to execute that plan. This involves the study and application of topics like computer vision, machine learning, sensor fusion, and motion planning to build sophisticated systems—such as self-driving cars, unmanned drones, and planetary rovers—that can function reliably and safely in complex, dynamic worlds.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework for writing robot software, functioning not as a traditional operating system but as a meta-operating system or middleware that runs on a host OS like Linux. It provides a standardized collection of libraries, tools, and conventions designed to simplify the complex task of creating robust robot behavior across a wide variety of platforms. At its core, ROS offers a message-passing architecture that allows different, independent programs (nodes) to communicate, enabling modular development for tasks such as perception, navigation, and manipulation, while also providing hardware abstraction, package management, and a vast ecosystem of community-contributed software to accelerate robotics research and development.