The Robot Revolution

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a stage akin to when the first lathe did a reasonable job on a hunk of metal. But machine vision has as important a role in automated assembly as human vision has for assembly by humans."

Rosen's system consists of a black-and-white TV camera that scans objects against a brightly lighted background, then transmits to a computer the hundreds of dots (or pixels) that form the TV image. The computer transforms these dots into binary code and compares what it sees with previously recorded descriptions of various objects. It compares features like perimeter and area, enabling it to recognize and choose among nine different objects. "Ten years from now," says Rosen, "this will be a dodo."

At the Lockheed Missiles and Space Co., engineers are already pushing one step further into a technique called "gray-imaging." Similar to Rosen's system but more elaborate, the Lockheed method uses a camera image that contains 100,000 different dots, each graded from 0 for pure white to 255 for pure black. The different shades of gray give the robot a much clearer three-dimensional view of what it is confronting.

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 Center in Huntsville, Ala., now are working on a robot that will be able to take off from the space shuttle, reach an ailing satellite in orbit and repair it. The Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., similarly, is building a robot that can be sent out aboard an unmanned submarine to find and repair crippled vessels undersea. Robots are already at work in the manufacture of tanks, aircraft, guns and ammunition.

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 of the touch systems are developing a robot claw's ability to measure objects, some are more elaborate. The Lord Corp. of Erie, Pa., hopes to market within five years a "hand" made out of spongy material with a grid of many sensitive wires embedded in it to achieve a true sense of touch.

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