Word: robots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Instead, a ground-based NASA "ingenuity team" decided to use the Discovery's 50-ft. Canadian-built robot arm to flip the LEASAT's switch into position. The arm is not equipped for such a task, and NASA ground crews had to coach the Discovery astronauts through the fabrication of attachments resembling flyswatters for the arm. While a ground team experimented with a duplicate of the arm, Discovery's "swat" team employed such mundane equipment as Swiss Army knives and a roll of duct tape to turn some plastic tubing, wire, a metal sunshade frame and plastic notebook covers into...
...exercise required close coordination between earth and space. Astronauts Sally Ride and Mary Cleave, who are experienced with the robot arm, practiced flipping a replica of the switch at Mission Control. Other technicians tested duplicates of the manipulators in a special vacuum chamber to make sure they would withstand the airless chill of outer space...
...autopilot that will effect similar corrections in the attitude of its mechanical wings. That will take some doing. Explains MacCready: "Nature's creatures are very good at active control. Artificial creatures are very bad. For example, any dumb person can walk across a rough field, but to make a robot who can walk across that same field is really difficult...
...design team from the University of Montreal, it depicts a once famous musician who sits at a grand piano in the middle of a hardwood floor, tickling the keys and tapping his white leather shoes to the beat of his memories. In striking contrast to the awkward, robot-like characters in earlier computer films, De Peltrie looks and acts human; his fingers and facial expressions are soft, lifelike and wonderfully appealing. In creating De Peltrie, the Montreal team may have achieved a breakthrough: a digitized character with whom a human audience can identify. --By Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Reported by Thomas...
...magazine subscriptions began showing up on their doorstep. And technicians began devising tools that would prevent Canter and Siegel from making good their threat. The most ingenious: a piece of software written by a Norwegian programmer that came to be known as the "cancelbot" -- a sort of information-seeking robot that roams the Internet looking for Canter and Siegel mass mailings and deletes them before they spread...