Foundations of AI and Robotics

Artificial intelligence (AI) is technology that enables computers and machines to simulate human abilities such as learning, comprehension, problem solving, decision-making, creativity, and autonomy. In simple terms, it is about making machines perform tasks that would normally need human intelligence.

• Machine Learning (ML) – Systems that learn patterns from data instead of following only hand-written rules.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) – Understanding and generating human language, including speech recognition, machine translation, and question answering.
• Computer Vision – Extracting information from images and videos, such as image classification, facial recognition, and object recognition.
• Robotics – Combining these abilities with physical machines, for example through robotic perception.

The current boom happened because three things finally came together at the same time:

• Better algorithms – The Transformer architecture (2017) lets a model relate all the words in a sentence at once, instead of reading them one by one like older RNNs and LSTMs.
• Massive data – The internet provides billions of examples of text for models to learn from.
• Powerful computing – Large GPU clusters make training practical. Without all three together, training a model like GPT-3 would have taken centuries instead of months.

• Transportation and logistics – The top application for professional service robots, with 117,500 units sold in 2025.
• Healthcare – Medical robot sales grew 19%, led by surgical robots (8,400 units, up 57%) as hospitals adopt them in clinical practice.
• Cleaning, agriculture, hospitality, and security – Service robots are also spreading into these everyday sectors.

Reasons: robots help organizations deal with labor shortages and improve productivity.

• Limited battery life – A robot cannot patrol for 24 hours on one charge, so it must return to a charging station on its own while keeping the facility covered.
• Hardware failures – Over nonstop operation, parts can fail, so the system has to be fault-tolerant and keep the patrol going when something breaks.
• Large, uncertain environment – A huge facility often needs several robots that must coordinate their routes, while handling uncertainties in movement and a changing environment.