Word: robotized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...noisy inferno at Westinghouse's lamp factory in Bloomfield, N.J., a Unimate 2015G robot performs a process called "swaging." This is somewhat like making spaghetti, but it is done with 21-in. rods of yellow tungsten, destined to become light-bulb filaments. The robot lifts them off a conveyor belt and sticks them into a blazing furnace (3,200° F), then into a swaging machine that stretches the rods until they have grown to 37 in. in length and shrunk to exactly .467 in. in diameter. Three workers, each of whom cost the company $20,000 per year...
...Faichney Drive in Watertown, N.Y., a Unimation Mark II is in charge of the delicate task of removing any air bubbles that may remain in the mercury inside a thermometer. Established in an isolated room, because of the increased awareness of the dangers of mercury poisoning, the robot takes a boxful
This sense of the robot as a helper rather than a menace is widespread among factory hands. Though robots are highly vulnerable to sabotage, there has been no trace of the Luddite violence that threatened the first labor-saving machines of the Industrial Revolution. On the contrary, working with a robot seems to confer status. And, while the machine usually looks less like a man than like a lobster, its human partners often seem unable to resist giving it a name and even lavishing on it a certain metallic affection. When one machine known as "Clyde the Claw" broke down...