Word: robotical
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...Robots sometimes seem remarkably stupid to the engineers trying to educate them. A robot can cope with complex mathematical formulas, of course, but when it sees something through its TV camera, it has a hard time translating the two-dimensional image into three-dimensional reality. A robot instructed to look for a triangular object will waste valuable time fingering cubes and cylinders before
...rejecting them. And when a component burned out in a robot at the University...
...M.I.T., great labor has gone into creating a robot that can watch someone constructing an arrangement of toy blocks and then duplicate that arrangement. Engineers at Japan's Waseda University built a robot seven years ago that could see and hear and carry out spoken instructions, but, says Ichiro Kato, chairman of the graduate school of science and engineering, "it had the mentality of a child 1½ years old." Kato's lab is now building a more advanced model. Says Kato: "It will probably have the mentality of a five-year...
Still, the main function of an industrial robot is not to think but to work, and there are many jobs that a sufficiently muscular and adroit five-year-old could do admirably. At Pratt & Whitney's automated casting factory in Middletown, Conn., ten of Unimation's Unimate 2000s are building ceramic molds for the manufacture of engine turbine blades. The company expects the new molds to help increase production from 50,000 to 90,000 blades a year. No less important, the robot-made molds are so much more uniform that their blades last twice as long...
...General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth, one of Cincinnati Milacron's T-3 robots makes sheet-metal parts for the F-16 fighter. The T-3 selects bits from a tool rack, drills a set of holes to a .005-in. tolerance and machines the perimeters of 250 types of parts. A man doing the same job can produce six parts per shift, with a 10% rejection rate. The robot makes 24 to 30 parts, with zero rejections. The machine costs over $60,000 and has saved $93,000 in its first year...