Electrical engineering provides the core technology for robotics, and the four disciplines of electricity, electronics, control, and computers play an essential role in advancing the design, control, and cognitive capabilities of robots.
What is electrical engineering and why do I need it to study robotics? As mentioned earlier, the core technology for robotics comes from electrical engineering. It’s hard to think of a more obvious and yet vague word than electricity. To understand this, it”s necessary to first understand the basic concepts of electrical engineering and its role.
Electrical engineering is a discipline that deals with the design, development, and application of various technologies that utilize electricity. These technologies have a wide range of applications, from everyday life to industry. Electricity isn’t just for lighting and running devices; electrical engineering encompasses everything from the generation, conversion, transmission, and distribution of electrical energy. For example, electrical engineers design power grids that reliably deliver electricity from power plants to homes and industrial facilities, and develop energy management systems to ensure efficient power use. They also play an important role in the development of modern technologies such as electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, and smart grids.
The roots of the Department of Electrical Engineering can be traced back to the name of the major’s prerequisite course, the Fourth Seminar, which is required of all current electrical engineering students. It’s not an electrical seminar, but what does it mean? The four subjects are electricity, electronics, control, and computers. These four departments existed before Seoul National University’s current Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science was created, and they were merged to form the current department.
In a nutshell, electricity is a field that designs and remodels power systems in power plants as we usually think of them, or efficiently converts electrical energy into kinetic energy through devices, i.e., designs motors and optimizes related devices. For example, when designing a motor for an electric vehicle, it is important to convert electrical energy into kinetic energy as efficiently as possible while considering power efficiency and durability. The details are a bit different, but it’s easy to think of it like this.
In the case of electronics, you can think of semiconductors, flash memory, displays, and smartphones, which are familiar as Korea’s main exports. If you think of Samsung Electronics as a representative company, it’s easy to understand what it sells and what it does. The field blurs the lines between electrical engineering and electronics, and electronics plays a huge role in robotics. Electronics, such as a robot’s sensors, are essential for a robot to recognize and interact with its external environment.
Think of computers as everything you know about the computer you’re using right now. It’s broken down into two parts: hardware and software. In robotics, computer hardware and software are particularly important, as they are essential for controlling and learning the robot’s behavior through the central processing unit (CPU), which acts as the brain of the robot, and artificial intelligence algorithms.
Finally, there’s the field of control, which is the key to the robots we all admired as children. This field aims to make machines closely mimic and understand human perception and behavior so that they can respond appropriately to human actions. A robot is a control system, not something else. A simple example of a control system is a touchscreen, which is already commercially available and used by everyone. When a human presses a certain part of the monitor with their hand, it displays the response.
In an even simpler example, a sensor that turns on the light in the bathroom, or even just a switch that turns on the lights in a room, can actually be a robot. It becomes more sophisticated when it better understands human behavior and responds accordingly, but as long as it responds to humans with a simple switch, it is a robot, or a control system.
Control engineering can also be divided into two main fields. One is the field of control engineering and systems theory. For example, if I create a group of robotic fish and I want to theorize how they can manage themselves in a river, I can do this by mathematically modeling the space of a real river and predicting how they should behave in different cases, depending on variables such as the flow rate and direction of the river, or the movement of other fish. It is a field that studies various cases in this way. It mainly studies communication network control, robot control, modeling and control of biological systems, guidance control and navigation systems, etc.
The second is the field of intelligence and robotics. This is a field that aims to develop the ability of robots to recognize objects with the five senses of a human. This is the most necessary ability for robots to communicate with humans. When we play soccer, for example, we see a space with a ball and a goal, and although it looks two-dimensional, we can imagine a three-dimensional space in our minds. They can perceive color differences, contrast differences, and many other differences between the ball and the stadium floor to estimate the size or distance of the ball, and given time to practice, they can become better shooters.
Robots can even see the world through a camera, just like us. But when you ask them how they know the ball and the goal are there, or how they instantaneously move their legs at that angle to hit the ball with that much force, or how they learned to kick the ball, they’re speechless. It’s too instantaneous. The goal of intelligent robotics research is to analyze human cognitive processes in order to represent them in the form of computer algorithms, so that they can be applied to robots.
In fact, in addition to this control engineering, sophisticated acoustics, image processing, and mechanical controls that have been studied for centuries, such as the simple but essential gyroscopes used in fighter jets, are essential to the improvement of robots. More advanced technologies, such as LiDAR sensors, which are at the heart of autonomous vehicles, act as the eyes and ears of the robot and contribute to increasing the robot’s autonomy in more complex and diverse environments.
In addition, there are a number of other application areas, such as improving the efficiency of semiconductors and devices in the direct robot circuitry or the batteries they run on, and the development of materials for the robot’s skeleton or ceramic materials to make it tactile. For example, self-healing materials, which are being explored in recent years, could be used in the robot’s exoskeleton to help increase its durability by repairing itself when damaged. These technologies are critical to ensuring that robots can operate reliably in human environments for long periods of time.
Robotics is a field that requires the combined research of practically all branches of engineering to create robots that can live alongside humans. While the development of robotics may seem vague in the context of human-shaped robots, it is important to note that voice recognition on smartphones, measuring and predicting traffic on highways using CCTV, and predicting human movements to guide the proper placement of guides in airports and other crowded places are all extensions of robotics technology. Robotics is broadly defined as the engineering of machines to communicate with humans.
In the future, robotics will require research not only in electrical and mechanical engineering, but also in other engineering disciplines and, if necessary, in neuroscience and psychology. This interdisciplinary research will pave the way for robots to better understand human emotions and intentions and interact naturally with humans. This interdisciplinary research is essential if robots are to become more humanized in our daily lives.
