Robots are being used to help humans by doing things that are dangerous, humans don’t do well, or just don’t like doing. A French scientist named Frank Van Der Velde wants to make robots learn from their mistakes, “for instance if it spilled coffee, next time it wouldn’t pour as much, so it wouldn’t spill.” He also wants robots to have brains like humans do, except smarter. A new robot, I-Cub   has skin fingers that can actually FEEL! Frank thinks that in about ten years there will be robot watch dogs! These robots would help  people because they wouldn’t have to train real dogs. Now people even have robot prosthetics, that move depending on how your muscle and nerve endings move!

Someday robots will be doing everything for us, because of the things that engineers are making them do now. Therefore, humans will become lazy because robots will be doing everything for them. There will be more consequences than benefits if we continue to enhance robots.

I made a robot that is designed to help humans in some way. My robot, NAME,  has extendable arms so it can do things like turn off the lights when you’re in bed all cozy and don’t want to get up. It can also reach up and get things that are up too high to reach for people. I don’t know how to make it actually work, so it is just a model of what it would look like. It was made out of bottles, cardboard, and duct tape. It would have extendable arms with fingers that could wrap around the object that it needs to pick up or move. In order to make it work you would just tell it what to do. There would be a microphone so it can be controlled by voice command. It will solve the problem of not being able to reach things. The kinds of people who would need my robot the most are short people or people who are handi-cap.

This project is related to The Last Dog because in The Last Dog it is futuristic where robots do almost everything, for the characters. For example, they check out people who want to leave the dome and disperse food and water. The positive consequence of the robots in the book is people don’t have to do most things, but the negative consequence of the robots in The Last Dog is people get lazy because they don’t have to do a lot.