Word: clawing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first new Pragma A-3000. The $110,000 robot, which has just been licensed by General Electric, is assembling a compressor valve unit from twelve separate parts. Its two arms can do totally different jobs at once. When it picks up a slightly defective gasket in its gray steel claw, it immediately senses something wrong, flicks the gasket to one side and picks up another. The Pragma produces 320 units an hour, without mistakes, and it can labor tirelessly for 24 hours a day. That makes it roughly the equivalent of ten human workers. Furthermore, it can easily be reprogrammed...
...robot's basic function is not to look or behave like a human being but to do a human's work, and for that it needs mainly a guiding brain (the computer) and an arm with claws for fingers. The computer is simply plugged into an electric outlet; cables run from the computer along the robot's arm and transmit instructions in the form of electric impulses to the claw; for heavy work, robots use hydraulic pressure. The Robot Institute of America, an industrial trade group, therefore offers a contemporary, if somewhat prolix, definition of a robot...
...touch," and report to their computer brains what their new senses tell them. To see means to decipher what appears before a TV camera; to touch means to measure not only the size and shape but the temperature, softness or vibration of the object grasped by the claw. Robots can also hear, and could presumably be taught to taste and smell, but these would be mainly indulgences, not necessary to their work ethos. On the other hand, robots are now being outfitted with senses that no human being has: the perception of infrared light and ultrasonic sound...
Douglas County Sheriff Jerry Maple decided that there was no choice but to try to disarm the bomb. Though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had offered to lend a robot with mechanical claw and television-camera eye, the authorities relied instead on a local firefighter, who attached a small explosive device to the bomb, which was supposed to either destroy the control box or detonate the crate's contents. At 3:42 p.m., authorities crossed their fingers and set off the small explosive...
...Carter-controlled Winograd Commission, charged with revamping the presidential nominating process, adopted the rule unanimously. It is ironic that rank outsider Jimmy Carter, who used the 1976 rule to claw his way from obscurity to the presidency, supported the changes from early on. "They (the White House) wanted to make sure that no outsiders will do to Jimmy Carter in 1980 what Jimmy Carter did to everyone else in 1976," said one commission member...