Word: robotics
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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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...
...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...