Is there a difference between artificial intelligence and robotics?

If you followed our first study on "What is AI?" You must surely be excited about taking the next step, on a new and very exciting topic, around AI and robotics. For this second study, our community was asked to establish a potential difference between artificial intelligence and robotics. To do this, three guiding questions were posed, the various answers to which we will summarize in this article.

The first question was whether artificial intelligence and robotics are similar.

People find it hard to separate AI from robotics, some think AI is part of robotics, others think robotics is part of AI, or that they are the same thing. This same line of thinking can be observed within our community, where 3% of members think that robotics and AI are similar, while 12.1% think that AI can be included in robotics.

However, they are two fundamentally different disciplines. Let's look at each term individually to understand the relationship between the two. Robotics is a branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, programming and use of robots. A robot is an autonomous - not autonomous - or semi-autonomous mechanical or software machine capable of performing one or more physical or cognitive tasks in an automated fashion. Artificial Intelligence is a branch of computer science that aims to develop systems capable of imitating or reproducing human cognitive abilities, such as perception, understanding, reasoning, learning, decision-making and interaction with the environment. Based on these definitions, it is clear that AI and robotics are not the same thing, but autonomous robots (also known as intelligent robots) and semi-autonomous robots need AI programmes to function properly and carry out the tasks for which they have been programmed. This leads us to the statement that AI can be included in robotics, as 84.8% of our community members believe.

If you've followed us this far, then you already know what robotics is, what artificial intelligence is, and the relationship between these two terms. However, we can put it even more simply: robotics is the science of robots, which involves designing, building and programming autonomous or semi-autonomous physical machines capable of performing repetitive tasks.