Are they really robots?

[Taylor]

According to a display I saw at the Indiana State Fair two months ago, robots have four distinct components:

1. Sensors
2. Controller/Program
3. Kinematics/Mechanisms
4. Actuators/Motors

FRC, FTC, FLL, and VRC have these (I presume BEST and NURC and BattleBots and BunnyBots and the litany of other competitions do too, but I've never personally seen them).

A generally accepted definition of a robot is a machine that reacts to its environment through the use of sensors, actuators, mechanisms, and programmed control. For all the aforementioned competitions - Check.

As for the teleop/autonomous argument, I see no difference between those. Does it really matter if the sensor used by the robot is a potentiometer, ultrasonic device, or joystick? They're all inputs, are they not? There's no direct causation between pushing a joystick forward and the robot moving in a forward direction. The program still has to interpret input data and react accordingly.

To a robot, a human is as much its environment as a soccer ball, vision target, or diamondplate wall, so to force such a distinction simply for the sake of definition would be unnecessary.

Are they robots? Sure. Does it matter if they're not? Other than semantics, not really.

For our next exercise, we should define Beauty and Truth.