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Once you stop to think about it for 5 minutes, you realize that a robot being a "rover" is less about the environment, and more about a functionally unfixed "hackery" way of seeing the environment. Like to babies and cats, an ordinary well-kept apartment is like Mars.
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The "civilization" of an environment is in your mind. The striated vs. smooth characteristics are mainly projections of your habitual behaviors and blindnesses, not so much physics (though there's a lot of that, IF you're adapted to the design of a built environment)
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For eg. a paved highway is a civilized built environment for cars, but not for deer or monkeys. A jungle is actually much more "civilized" from a monkey's point of view than a highway. A highway might as well be Mars to a monkey.
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Thinking about this because I'm trying to think through a design for a domestic *rover* that can get around and do things, not a domestic service robot like a vacuum cleaner or smart kitchen.
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Arguably, rovers are the true robots. Robots that are perfectly designed to fit an application are more like automation machinery. The reason we are reluctant to call a CNC milling machine a "robot" is that outside it's narrowly designed application regime, it has no abilities
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Ignoring for a moment the fact that the word "robot" comes from servant/slave worker, the modern connotation is more autonomy in less curated environments. If you put aligned smarts in the environment, you're automating rather than roboticizing.
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It is a robot only to the degree the environment is unmanaged, or managed for a purpose that does not comprehend the presence of the robot. A rover is the purest kind of robot.
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