=================================================================== WIRED HANDS

- A Brief Look at Robotics NEWSCIENCE ------------------------

------------------------------------------- Two years ago, the Chrysler corpora
tion completely gutted its Windsor, Ontario, car assembly plant and within six w
eeks had installed an entirely new factory inside the building. It was a marvel
of engineering. When it came time to go to work, a whole new work force marche
d onto the assembly line. There on opening day was a crew of 150 industrial rob
ots. Industrial robots don't look anything like the androids from sci-fi books
and movies. They don't act like the evil Daleks or a fusspot C-3P0. If anythin
g, the industrial robots toiling on the Chrysler line resemble elegant swans or
baby brontosauruses with their fat, squat bodies, long arched necks and small he
ads. An industrial robot is essentially a long manipulator arm that holds tools
such as welding guns or motorized screwdrivers or grippers for picking up objec
ts. The robots working at Chrysler and in numerous other modern factories are e
xtremely adept at performing highly specialized tasks - one robot may spray pain
t car parts while another does spots welds while another pours radioactive chemi
cals. Robots are ideal workers: they never get bored and they work around the c
lock. What's even more important, they're flexible. By altering its programmin
g you can instruct a robot to take on different tasks. This is largely what sets
robots apart from other machines; try as you might you can't make your washing
machine do the dishes. Although some critics complain that robots are stealing
much-needed jobs away from people, so far they've been given only the dreariest,
dirtiest, most soul-destroying work. The word robot is Slav in origin and is r
elated to the words for work and worker. Robots first appeared in a play, Rossu
m's Universal Robots, written in 1920 by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek. The
play tells of an engineer who designs man-like machines that have no human weak
ness and become immensely popular. However, when the robots are used for war th
ey rebel against their human masters. Though industrial robots do dull, dehuman
izing work, they are nevertheless a delight to watch as they crane their long ne
cks, swivel their heads and poke about the area where they work. They satisfy "
that vague longing to see the human body reflected in a machine, to see a living
function translated into mechanical parts", as one writer has said. Just as mu
ch fun are the numerous "personal" robots now on the market, the most popular of
which is HERO, manufactured by Heathkit. Looking like a plastic step-stool on
wheels, HERO can lift objects with its one clawed arm and utter computer-synthes
ized speech. There's Hubot, too, which comes with a television screen face, fla
shing lights and a computer keyboard that pulls out from its stomach. Hubot mov
es at a pace of 30 cm per second and can function as a burglar alarm and a wake
up service. Several years ago, the swank department store Neiman-Marcus sold a
robot pet, named Wires. When you boil all the feathers out of the hype, HERO, H
ubot, Wires et. al. are really just super toys. You may dream of living like a
slothful sultan surrounded by a coterie of metal maids, but any further automati
on in your home will instead include things like lights that switch on automatic
ally when the natural light dims or carpets with permanent suction systems built
into them. One of the earliest attempts at a robot design was a machine, nickn
amed Shakey by its inventor because it was so wobbly on its feet. Today, poor S
hakey is a rusting pile of metal sitting in the corner of a California laborator
y. Robot engineers have since realized that the greater challenge is not in put
ting together the nuts and bolts, but rather in devising the lists of instructio
ns - the "software - that tell robots what to do". Software has indeed beco
me increasingly sophisticated year by year. The Canadian weather service now e
mploys a program called METEO which translates weather reports from English to
French. There are computer programs that diagnose medical ailments and locate
valuable ore deposits. Still other computer programs play and win at chess, c
heckers and go. As a results, robots are undoubtedly getting "smarter". The
Diffracto company in Windsor is one of the world's leading designers and make
rs of machine vision. A robot outfitted with Diffracto "eyes" can find a part,
distinguish it from another part and even examine it for flaws. Diffracto is
now working on a tomato sorter which examines colour, looking for no-red - i.e.
unripe - tomatoes as they roll past its TV camera eye. When an unripe tomat
o is spotted, a computer directs a robot arm to pick out the pale fruit. Anot
her Diffracto system helps the space shuttle's Canadarm pick up satellites from
space. This sensor looks for reflections on a satellites gleaming surface and c
an determine the position and speed of the satellite as it whirls through the sk
y. It tells the astronaut when the satellite is in the right position to be sna
tched up by the space arm. The biggest challenge in robotics today is makin
g software that can help robots find their way around a complex and chaotic worl
d. Seemingly sophisticated tasks such as robots do in the factories can often b
e relatively easy to program, while the ordinary, everyday things people do - wa
lking, reading a letter, planning a trip to the grocery store - turn out to be i
ncredibly difficult. The day has still to come when a computer program can do a
nything more than a highly specialized and very orderly task. The trouble with
having a robot in the house for example, is that life there is so unpredictable,
as it is everywhere else outside the assembly line. In a house, chairs get mov
ed around, there is invariably some clutter on the floor, kids and pets are alwa
ys running around. Robots work efficiently on the assembly line where there is
no variation, but they are not good at improvisation. Robots are disco, not jaz
z. The irony in having a robot housekeeper is that you would have to keep your
house perfectly tidy with every item in the same place all the time so that your
metal maid could get around. Many of the computer scientists who are attemptin
g to make robots brighter are said to working in the field of Artificial Intelli
gence, or AI. These researchers face a huge dilemma because there is no real co
nsensus as to what intelligence is. Many in AI hold the view that the human min
d works according to a set of formal rules. They believe that the mind is a clo
ckwork mechanism and that human judgement is simply calculation. Once these for
mal rules of thought can be discovered, they will simply be applied to machines.
On the other hand, there are those critics of AI who contend that thought is
intuition, insight, inspiration. Human consciousness is a stream in which ideas
bubble up from the bottom or jump into the air like fish. This debate over i
ntelligence and mind is, of course, one that has gone on for thousands of years.
Perhaps the outcome of the "robolution" will be to make us that much wiser.