Word: robotical
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...fact that the robot's instructions can be changed is critically important to its industrial use. A standard assembly line must produce a large amount (about 1,000 units a day in the auto industry) to operate economically, and it takes months to alter or renovate its component machines; a robot can be reprogrammed for a new task in a few minutes. Furthermore, at least 60% of U.S. manufacturing is done in batches too small for assembly lines. Robots can do many of those jobs, and it is estimated that they can reduce costs in small-lot manufacturing...
General Motors has developed a system called Consight that enables a robot equipped with an electronic camera to look at scattered parts on a conveyor, pick them up and transfer them in a specific sequence to another work area. It thus makes rudimentary judgments on which parts to pick up, but it is still too slow for an industrial assembly line. At a well-attended robot exhibition last month in Dearborn, Mich., one of the star attractions was a similar vision system developed by a brand-new company, Machine Intelligence Corp. of Mountain View, Calif. This firm was founded...
...step further into a technique called "gray-imaging." Similar to Rosen's system but more elaborate, the Lockheed method uses a camera image that contains 100,000 different dots, each graded from 0 for pure white to 255 for pure black. The different shades of gray give the robot a much clearer three-dimensional view of what it is confronting...
Lockheed's project, which started with an Army contract to search for means of spotting defective artillery shells, is only one of many robot efforts sponsored by military and space programs. The most spectacular, of course, is the Voyager 1 robot, which traveled 1.3 billion miles to Saturn. Almost equally impressive is the Mars Rover being built by CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which will be able to wheel itself about on the rugged planet, look at rocks with its TV eyes and dig up samples with its shovel. Engineers at the Marshall Space Flight...
There are some experts, though, who believe that sight is much less important than touch, either undersea or on the assembly line. "I can't afford to let the robot arm wait while the camera does all the things it needs to do," says GE's Mirabal, who says he has looked at 20 vision systems and found none that is economical. "Touch is going to be very important, because all the robot needs is to know that something is happening or not happening. Just one piece of information that can be analyzed quickly." While most...