• Question: do you need a motherboard for your robots?

    Asked by 557artk46 to Petros, Peppe on 4 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Petros Papapanagiotou

      Petros Papapanagiotou answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      Of course! The motherboard is what connects the different parts of a computer or robot together. The brain (processor), the eyes and ears (sensors), the monitor, the arms an legs, the mouth (speakers), all connect to each other through the motherboard. It may be different shapes and sizes, but all computers and robots have one.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      For my experience, depending on the complexity of the robot, it is not mandatory to use a motherboard. It is required to use a “microcontroller” which is a bit more than the CPU (the “heart” of a computer) which is fixed on the motherboard. A microcontroller is the big black square that you can see on an Arduino board.

      Since robots are coming out of the labs only recently, there isn’t a common practice on how to make them. But it is common to have one or more microcontroller on the robot body whose purpose is only driving some mechanical components. Complex robots (like the ones on my profile picture) require to be supported by many interconnected computers (cluster computers) which have motherboards and are fundamental for more complicated operations such as finding a cup among a lot of rubbish on a desk. Other robots, such as the Nao (https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/robots/nao), sorting machines and possibly the Tesco self-checkout, are in the middle and use a minicomputer (powerful enough to run Windows or Linux but too weak to run Call of Duty) to coordinate all the microcontrollers, but those cases are rare. Unfortunately most of robots, and probably even autonomous cars, need to use a computer, as Petros said, as the software is still to complex to run on miniaturised computers

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