The Robot Revolution

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rejecting them. And when a component burned out in a robot at the University of

Florida, the machine suddenly hit itself so hard that it sheared off its arm. Says John Dixon, a computer scientist working on the Navy's underwater explorer: "We humans have been manipulating things ever since we were children, so we're extremely good at it. But if you analyze everything that's going on when you do a simple thing like picking up an object, it's really very complicated." Adds David Grossman, I.B.M.'s manager of automation research: "It's like trying to write down how to tie a shoe."

At 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-old."

Still, the main function of an industrial robot is not to think but to work, and there are many jobs that a sufficiently muscular and adroit five-year-old could do admirably. At Pratt & Whitney's automated casting factory in Middletown, Conn., ten of Unimation's Unimate 2000s are building ceramic molds for the manufacture of engine turbine blades. The company expects the new molds to help increase production from 50,000 to 90,000 blades a year. No less important, the robot-made molds are so much more uniform that their blades last twice as long as blades molded by humans.

At the General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth, one of Cincinnati Milacron's T-3 robots makes sheet-metal parts for the F-16 fighter. The T-3 selects bits from a tool rack, drills a set of holes to a .005-in. tolerance and machines the perimeters of 250 types of parts. A man doing the same job can produce six parts per shift, with a 10% rejection rate. The robot makes 24 to 30 parts, with zero rejections. The machine costs over $60,000 and has saved $93,000 in its first year.

In a noisy inferno at Westinghouse's lamp factory in Bloomfield, N.J., a Unimate 2015G robot performs a process called "swaging." This is somewhat like making spaghetti, but it is done with 21-in. rods of yellow tungsten, destined to become light-bulb filaments. The robot lifts them off a conveyor belt and sticks them into a blazing furnace (3,200° F), then into a swaging machine that stretches the rods until they have grown to 37 in. in length and shrunk to exactly .467 in. in diameter. Three workers, each of whom cost the company $20,000 per year, used to do this very unpleasant labor with increasingly uneven results during their eight-hour shifts. The robot does it flawlessly for 16 to 24 hours a day. It will pay for itself in 2½ years.

At the Chesebrough-Pond's thermometer plant at 98.6 Faichney Drive in Watertown, N.Y., a Unimation Mark II is in charge of the delicate task of removing any air bubbles that may remain in the mercury inside a thermometer. Established in an isolated room, because of the increased awareness of the dangers of mercury poisoning, the robot takes a boxful