Word: robots
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...coffee break when you have a request? Not the proprietor of a compact-disc outlet that opened last week in Minneapolis. The clerk behind the counter boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of the 5,400-item inventory, and never leaves the store. The attendant can't, because it is a robot -- the first to run its own shop...
Invented by Robert Cahlander and David Carroll of the Robot Aided Manufacturing Center in Red Wing, Minn., the robot has a 400-lb. arm that dispenses discs, makes change and processes credit-card purchases. Its computer brain also tracks inventory and cues up tunes for customers who punch their requests on a keyboard. The designers may franchise an army of the devices. Behind every great robot, of course, there is a human -- in this case a worker who drops by once a week to replenish the stock and collect the receipts. And maybe, says Carroll, "clean the glass with...
Researchers at Tokyo University are pursuing an even more ambitious goal. Working under Iwao Fujimasa, an artificial-heart specialist, a team of 20 scientists is building a robot less than 1 mm (0.045 in.) in diameter that could travel through veins and inside organs, locating and treating diseased tissue. The group hopes to build a prototype within three years for testing on a horse, but the researchers first must obtain gears, screws and other parts 1,000 times smaller than the tiniest available today...
...ultimate fantasy of the miniaturists is tiny robot "assemblers" that could operate at the atomic level, building finished goods one molecule at a time. This is the far-reaching goal of an embryonic discipline called nanotechnology, so named because it would require manipulating objects , measured in billionths of a meter (nanometers). In Engines of Creation, the nanotechnologist's bible, K. Eric Drexler envisions a world in which everything from locomotives to cheeseburgers is assembled from molecular raw materials, much as proteins are created from their amino-acid building blocks by the machinery of a living cell...
...Mars mission is 2020. That allows plenty of time for a measured approach and spreads the expenditure over a sensible period. It also gives NASA ample opportunity to choose the next goal after Mars -- exploration of the asteroid belt, for example, or a manned trip to the outer planets. Robot probes would have to study the Red Planet in depth first. One, the Mars Observer, is scheduled for a 1992 launch, and others would have to follow...