Level T 3

Robots A Reading A–Z Level T Benchmark Book Word Count: 1,221 BENCHMARK • T Robots Written by Lisa Ing Visit www.readinga-z.com for thousands of books and materials. www.readinga-z.com Robots Photo Credits: Front cover, back cover, pages 3, 5, 6 (upper right, bottom), 9, 10: © NASA; title page: © ArtToday; page 4: © Bettmann/CORBIS; pages 6 (upper left), 7: © Royalty-Free/CORBIS; page 8: © Erik Patten/www.mountsutro.org; page 11: © Hashimoto Noboru/ CORBIS SYGMA; page 13: © Najlah Feanny/CORBIS SABA; page 14: © Gordon David/CORBIS SYGMA; page 15: © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS. Front cover: A scientist poses with Sojourner, a Mars rover. Back cover: Dante II crawls near the mouth of an active volcano. Written by Lisa Ing Robots Level T Benchmark Book © Learning A–Z, Inc. Written by Lisa Ing All rights reserved. www.readinga-z.com www.readinga-z.com Correlation LEVEL T Fountas & Pinnell Reading Recovery DRA P 23 38 Table of Contents What Are Robots? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Tireless Workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Dangerous Situations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The human-like Robot and his “family” from the TV show Lost in Space What Are Robots? Robot Explorers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Mechanical Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Robot Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3 You may think of robots as the human-like machines you’ve seen in movies, television shows, and books. But in real life, robots aren’t as advanced as R2D2 from Star Wars. Most robots cannot imitate humans or think for themselves. However, real robots can do many interesting things. They can perform dangerous tasks such as exploring active volcanoes, visiting distant planets, and defusing bombs. They can also do more common tasks such as build cars and play chess. Perhaps one day people will be able to build robots as smart as humans. 4 Robots are machines with mechanical bodies, information sensors, and computer brains. Most robots can move or have moving parts. Many robots can also use devices like video cameras and microphones to act as their “eyes” and “ears” to gather information from the world around them. Robots are programmed to perform certain tasks, either independently or by remote control. The program plans every step of the robot’s job in painstaking detail. Most robots cannot do anything that they have not been programmed to do. antenna camera computer brain arm wheels The space shuttle’s arm Assembly line arm Mars rover gathering samples Simple robots can perform simple tasks, such as moving car parts on an assembly line. For this job, the robot only needs one arm, a sensor that tells it where the parts are, and a program that governs lifting the part and putting it down in the right place. As robots get more complex, more programs have to be packed into their computer brains. It is much easier to build ten robots to do ten different things than it is to build one robot to do those ten things. Therefore, robots tend to be specialized for the tasks they perform. A huge robot arm looks very different from a small explorer robot, and they could not do each other’s job. obstacle 5 6 Tireless Workers Imagine working at a job picking up nails and putting them into boxes as they pass through an assembly line. Imagine that this is the only thing you do all day and night,