What kind of robots is Paul going to discuss?

W: Hi, Paul. All set for your speech club presentation this evening?
M: Yeah. I’m going to discuss robots.
W: Robots? You mean those machines that walk and talk like in the movies?
M: No. Industrial robots like those used in the automobile and electronics industries.
W: Come to. think of it, I saw an article about that kind of robot the other day. Several pictures of robots welding ears, but they certainly didn’t look the way I thought robots should look.
M: The robots we usually imagine are made up in science fiction. In industry, robots are designed to do a specific set of operations such as welding car frames. They are rarely built to resemble humans.
W: Actually all they need is a kind of brain to give signals, and a mechanism such as an arm to carry out instructions. Right?
M: Right. Tiny computers become the brains of these robots. The computers send signals in the form of electrical impulses that move an arm in a claw. The claw is the hand that does particular kinds of work.
W: OK. But we’ve had machines on assembly lines doing work for people for years. That’s what started the industrial revolution, remember?
M: But each of those machines can only perform a single operation. And it takes months to modify them. The new industrial robots can each do a number of tasks and it’s easy to reprogram them to perform totally different operations. That’s one reason they’re becoming so popular.
W: They increase productivity too, don’t they? I read that even though they’re still quite expensive, they often cost less per year than a worker doing the same job. I imagine robots will be used more and more.
M: Exactly. So now that you know all about the next industrial revolution, you don’t have to come to speech club tonight.