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- WIRED HANDS - A Brief Look at Robotics NEWSCIENCE
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- Two years ago, the Chrysler corporation completely gutted its
- Windsor, Ontario, car assembly plant and within six weeks had
- installed an entirely new factory inside the building. It was a
- marvel of engineering. When it came time to go to work, a whole
- new work force marched onto the assembly line. There on
- opening day was a crew of 150 industrial robots.
-
- Industrial robots don't look anything like the androids from
- sci-fi books and movies. They don't act like the evil Daleks or a
- fusspot C-3P0. If anything, the industrial robots toiling on the
- Chrysler line resemble elegant swans or baby brontosauruses
- with their fat, squat bodies, long arched necks and small heads.
- An industrial robot is essentially a long manipulator arm that
- holds tools such as welding guns or motorized screwdrivers or
- grippers for picking up objects.
-
- The robots working at Chrysler and in numerous other modern
- factories are extremely adept at performing highly specialized
- tasks - one robot may spray paint car parts while another does
- spots welds while another pours radioactive chemicals. Robots
- are ideal workers: they never get bored and they work around the
- clock. What's even more important, they're flexible. By altering
- its programming you can instruct a robot to take on different
- tasks. This is largely what sets robots apart from other
- machines; try as you might you can't make your washing machine
- do the dishes. Although some critics complain that robots are
- stealing much-needed jobs away from people, so far they've been
- given only the dreariest, dirtiest, most soul-destroying work.
-
- The word robot is Slav in origin and is related to the words for
- work and worker. Robots first appeared in a play, Rossum's
- Universal Robots, written in 1920 by the Czech playwright, Karel
- Capek. The play tells of an engineer who designs man-like
- machines that have no human weakness and become immensely
- popular. However, when the robots are used for war they rebel
- against their human masters.
-
- Though industrial robots do dull, dehumanizing work, they are
- nevertheless a delight to watch as they crane their long necks,
- swivel their heads and poke about the area where they work.
- They satisfy "that vague longing to see the human body reflected
- in a machine, to see a living function translated into mechanical
- parts", as one writer has said.
-
- Just as much fun are the numerous "personal" robots now on the
- market, the most popular of which is HERO, manufactured by
- Heathkit. Looking like a plastic step-stool on wheels, HERO can
- lift objects with its one clawed arm and utter
- computer-synthesized speech. There's Hubot, too, which comes
- with a television screen face, flashing lights and a computer
- keyboard that pulls out from its stomach. Hubot moves at a pace
- of 30 cm per second and can function as a burglar alarm and a
- wake up service. Several years ago, the swank department store
- Neiman-Marcus sold a robot pet, named Wires.
-
- When you boil all the feathers out of the hype, HERO, Hubot, Wires
- et. al. are really just super toys. You may dream of living like a
- slothful sultan surrounded by a coterie of metal maids, but any
- further automation in your home will instead include things like
- lights that switch on automatically when the natural light dims
- or carpets with permanent suction systems built into them.
-
- One of the earliest attempts at a robot design was a machine,
- nicknamed Shakey by its inventor because it was so wobbly on
- its feet. Today, poor Shakey is a rusting pile of metal sitting in
- the corner of a California laboratory. Robot engineers have since
- realized that the greater challenge is not in putting together the
- nuts and bolts, but rather in devising the lists of instructions -
- the "software - that tell robots what to do".
-
- Software has indeed become increasingly sophisticated year by
- year. The Canadian weather service now employs a program
- called METEO which translates weather reports from English to
- French. There are computer programs that diagnose medical
- ailments and locate valuable ore deposits. Still other computer
- programs play and win at chess, checkers and go.
-
- As a results, robots are undoubtedly getting "smarter". The
- Diffracto company in Windsor is one of the world's leading
- designers and makers of machine vision. A robot outfitted with
- Diffracto "eyes" can find a part, distinguish it from another part
- and even examine it for flaws. Diffracto is now working on a
- tomato sorter which examines colour, looking for no-red - i.e.
- unripe - tomatoes as they roll past its TV camera eye. When an
- unripe tomato is spotted, a computer directs a robot arm to pick
- out the pale fruit.
-
- Another Diffracto system helps the space shuttle's Canadarm
- pick up satellites from space. This sensor looks for reflections
- on a satellites gleaming surface and can determine the position
- and speed of the satellite as it whirls through the sky. It tells
- the astronaut when the satellite is in the right position to be
- snatched up by the space arm.
-
- The biggest challenge in robotics today is making software that
- can help robots find their way around a complex and chaotic
- world. Seemingly sophisticated tasks such as robots do in the
- factories can often be relatively easy to program, while the
- ordinary, everyday things people do - walking, reading a letter,
- planning a trip to the grocery store - turn out to be incredibly
- difficult. The day has still to come when a computer program
- can do anything more than a highly specialized and very orderly
- task.
-
- The trouble with having a robot in the house for example, is that
- life there is so unpredictable, as it is everywhere else outside
- the assembly line. In a house, chairs get moved around, there is
- invariably some clutter on the floor, kids and pets are always
- running around. Robots work efficiently on the assembly line
- where there is no variation, but they are not good at
- improvisation. Robots are disco, not jazz. The irony in having a
- robot housekeeper is that you would have to keep your house
- perfectly tidy with every item in the same place all the time so
- that your metal maid could get around.
-
- Many of the computer scientists who are attempting to make
- robots brighter are said to working in the field of Artificial
- Intelligence, or AI. These researchers face a huge dilemma
- because there is no real consensus as to what intelligence is.
- Many in AI hold the view that the human mind works according to
- a set of formal rules. They believe that the mind is a clockwork
- mechanism and that human judgement is simply calculation.
- Once these formal rules of thought can be discovered, they will
- simply be applied to machines.
-
- On the other hand, there are those critics of AI who contend that
- thought is intuition, insight, inspiration. Human consciousness
- is a stream in which ideas bubble up from the bottom or jump
- into the air like fish.
-
- This debate over intelligence and mind is, of course, one that has
- gone on for thousands of years. Perhaps the outcome of the
- "robolution" will be to make us that much wiser.
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