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Unit 10: Electricity Page 17
Caution about Batteries its environment and have some
degree of intelligence.
We
recommend When scientists design robots, they
using the first determine what they want the
super-cheap robot to do. Turn on a light? Make
kind of pancakes? Drive the car? Once
batteries you’ve outlined your tasks, then
(usually the real fun begins… namely,
labeled “Heavy Duty” or “Super figuring out exactly how to
Heavy Duty”), usually found at accomplish the tasks.
‘dollar stores’, because these
types of batteries are carbon-zinc, Leonardo da Vinci designed a
which do not contain acid (the way mechanical knight back in the late
alkaline batteries do). So when 1400s. His drawing sketched out
your kid shorts the circuits and how it could sit upright and move
overheats the batteries (which you arms, legs, and jaws. Jacques de
should expect, by the way), it’s not Vaucanson, in the late 1700s,
dangerous. Alkaline batteries (like created the first life-sized
Energizer and Duracell) will get mechanical automatons, including
super-hot and lead acid, so those a mechanical duck that could flap
aren’t the ones you want your kids its wings. It was the Japanese toy
to play with. You can also take industry that really kicked off the
these types of batteries apart when mechanical revolution of inventions
they’ve exhausted their charge. with complex mechanical
inventions that could either paint
Robotics pictures, fire arrows from a quiver,
or serve tea. Not long after, in
Robots are 1898, Nikola Tesla demonstrated
electro- the first radio-controlled torpedo.
mechanical In 1948, the first electronic
devices, autonomous robots (robots that do
meaning their ‘thing’ automatically) were
that they Elmer and Elsie, who could sense
rely on both electronics and light, contact, and navigate
mechanics to do their ‘thing’. If a through a room.
robot has sensors, it can react with
By putting together motors,
switches, lights, buzzers, light
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