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by Scott McClellan |
Robots have been around for about 30 years now, but it's only been the last decade or so that they've become inexpensive and dependable enough to be used widely in industry. For a long time it was feared that robots would take away jobs from people in factories. While this has happened in certain assembly-line jobs, the overall impact of robots in the workplace has been to free up workers to do more challenging jobs and to increase the efficiency of industry.
Today, factories are using increasingly complex robots in manufacturing and assembly. Industrial robots are not anything like the ones in science fiction movies and they are not humanoid in appearance.
Robots are controlled by computers and must be programmed to do their tasks. Most are some type of mechanical arm, called a manipulator, which moves the parts or tools through a programmed sequence of motions. What makes them 'robotic' is the fact that they're controlled by computers and can be reprogrammed to do different tasks.
The advantage of robots is that they can do many boring, repetitious or even dangerous jobs that used to be done by humans, such as spray painting automobiles, loading and unloading machines, or welding bicycle frames without getting tired, making mistakes, or risking illness or injury.
All major automobile manufacturers now use robot on their assembly lines. In the aviation industry robots are used to drill wings of aircraft and to rivet parts together, among other things. They are used in watch making to assemble parts so small they can hardly be sen. In the nuclear industry, robots can be programmed to go into a nuclear power plant and process radioactive waste.
Cybernetics represents the frontier of this technology. Artificial intelligence uses computers to capture what makes human intelligence. Neuro networks use a model of the human brain to do their computation. They enable the computer to adapt to its environment and actually learn for itself, even adapt a kind of personality of its own which was not programmed into it. Using artificial intelligence and neuro networks, computers will be able to 'think' for themselves. They'll be able to react to different environments as humans do.
Through cybernetics you can get machines that are directly connected to people. These technologies allow humans to interact with the robots. An emerging application of this is virtual reality, or VR, which enables a person to interact with a computer-generated environment.
Virtual reality is like a very complex video game where your senses are being simulated in the virtual world. Because it's controlled by the computer, you can have experiences in the virtual world that you couldn't have in the real world.
Right now the VR game world is very limited because it's being simulated on a screen and you only have buttons and a joystick as your controls. But once you introduce eye phones that track the movements of your eyes and project images on them in stereo, you can interact in the virtual environment in a realistic manner. Using sensors on your hands, you can move your hand around in the virtual world. Maybe you'll have a body suit on with sensors that can project the movements of your body into the virtual world.
tgmag@tgmag.ca