In February, I had started to take coding lessons with Mrs Zillhardt at school. Initially, we were learning the binary system, but soon ventured on to build robots at school and program them. These were not serious robots but little toy ones that are used in school to introduce the topic.
Unlike the robots at school, Mum's friends Dr. Jörg Raczkowsky works with real robots at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. We visited him on the Tuesday afternoon and he gave us a private tour of many of the demonstration and research robots at his institute.
We learned that many industrial robots mainly have one arm that does something in a specific production environment. We also learned that all of these robots arms have six degrees of freedom in the 3D space: shift along x-axis, shift along y-axis, shift along z-axis, and turns along each of these these axes.
Jörg wanted to show us a 3D printer that was actually doing its work, but it had already finished.
 |
| A robot arm with six degrees of freedom |
 |
| A different mode of the same idea: six degrees of freedom |
 |
| This is one of a cluster of robots that can cluster to form a bigger "organism" |
 |
| Two robots with parallel translations; a 3D printer uses that same mechanism |
