UKH

Apart from the toy flying drones I've killed, my washing machine and my robot vacuum, there aren't many robots out in the wild doing stuff.

Granted the USA, Russia and China have Killer Bots stalking the sky's but is that really the future of robotics, to kill efficiently?

youtube.com/watch?v=s6_azdBnAlU&

no printer then?  They are quite hard working.   You could add pen plotters too - the HP ones we had in the oil industry never drew 2 identical charts or diagrams in the same sequence of pen movements or even pens as they scheduled their own work based on what the mini had sent them and what was in their buffer

The "dog" looks quite insect/spider/crab like to me with its odd legs.  It could bring the Hound in Fahrenheit 451 televised manhunts into reality!

Don't think I could class my laser printer as a robot. Its mechanical, but its not a complicated machine.

Now there's a memory! Picking a coloured pen from the carousel, a line here, a line there, a bit of hatching, a new colour, glossy paper flying backwards a forwards, and, finally, draw a diagonal line across the entire page due to missing the final Pen Up command! 

lots of robots in factories and distribution centres. Ocado for example.

You're not looking hard enough!

A typewriter is a machine because its purely mechanical, but I'd say anything that's whizzing around with some sensors attached is straying into robotics, so the printer definitely counts in my book. It has to compute moving the print head around, timing the printing, telling you if it's out of ink and paper or jammed...

If you want more examples similar to the ones you listed. Robot arms in car assembly lines. Bomb disposal. GPS controlled combine harvesters. Pipe climbing robots that do ultrasound scans or xray to check for corrosion. Loads used in conditions where you wouldn't send a human like disaster relief, nuclear decommissioning, underwater surveys...

Edit: mostly typos

how far could you go towards making  the uncomplicated thing, the mechanics, the electronics, the software to allow it to do its work semi autonomously?

I've built a replica microcomputer from scratch on veroboard and I found that taxing enough!

There was a robot lawn mower on the big roundabout next to Bramhall hall. I say "was" because it floods most winters and I've not seen it since the last inundation.

Out in the wild ? Most modern farm and forestry machinery.

Then cars are heading that way with auto braking, not crossing white lines, abs etc

It all depends on how low you set the bar; any machine controlled by a computer might be considered a robot, and clearly there are many millions of these at work, mainly in manufacturing and distribution.

But genuinely autonomous machines, capable of determining a course of action and executing it...I can think of almost none. Those which do exist are typically one-off experiments produced by universities or tech companies, and their functionality is so heavily constrained they could not survive a trip to Sainsbury’s, let alone the wild.

Most of the airliners are resting currently but they're pretty damned reliable robots.

Is a PC a robot? 

Jk

Me do I count

"We are already a cyborg," Musk said. "People don't realize — we are already a cyborg because we are so well integrated with our phones and our computers. The phone is almost like an extension of yourself. If you forget your phone, it's like a missing limb. But the communication bandwidth to the phone is very low, especially input."

That in mind I got the best phone I can buy for the money.  If I'm a cyborg.  I want to be the best cyborg with the best computer brain.  

Off to the gym soon to work on my meatsack upgrades.

The ability to spin fans and pop out CD trays does not count for me.

BTW I no longer have a CD drive

Not sure what you mean by out in the wild but our world is built by CNC machines, they're not as humanoid as the factory robot arms but they're hard worked reliable robots.

Jk

Robotic surgery. An incredible advance on cutting a great big hole in your abdomen or slicing your knee in half. I was on top of a Munro within a week of a major operation last year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System

https://www.stryker.com/us/en/portfolios/orthopaedics/joint-replacement/mak...

Also Cobots. Coming to a production line near you. Designed to collaborate with human workers. Your ready-made pizza was likely topped by a Cobot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobot

youtube.com/watch?v=okVM0sSwmNQ&

I suppose the real issue is what you define as a robot. The si fi robot able to perform tasks without human input or a machine that performs a task when controlled by a human and given the materials in a very specific way. As impressive as they are the robots used in surgery are just micro manipulation tools with the ultimate steady hand. Take away the highly skilled surgeon and you have nothing.

I'd argue it's the other way around, there are less and less items in our daily life that don't have a programmed machine somewhere in it's production. 

If an item isn't hand sourced and hand crafted, then it is likely a robot of some type was involved. You've likely touched dozens today, or are even sitting on one now, many of ikeas components warehouses are human free to an extent. 

But what do you make of the Cobots?

As far as i see they are just the same as any other assistive equipment. Simply moving to command with some extra safeguards to reduce the chance of splatting the human involved. 

It seems a somewhat vague term which could have been used in the past for any hardware which featured low risk if something went wrong. For gethin_allen response it seems to be blurring into general AI. Which despite being impressed and hopeful a couple of years back now I think chances of a new winter are rather high.

I would note with regards to pizza Zume attempted the not just make it but also cook and prepare for delivery and imploded rather spectacularly.