Slashdot Mirror
Immobile Robots
Roland Piquepaille writes "Wade Roush wrote a long and well-documented article for the Technology Review about this new concept, the immobot, short for "immobile robot." He gives different industrial examples, from NASA to the water utility in Porto Alegre, and from Toyota cars to some new Xerox photocopiers. And he looks at the programming model behind the immobots. No "heuristic" programs here, but model-based programs instead. Check this column for details." The original article has more information.
Wouldn't an immobile robot just be a computer, then? It seems as though they are just discussing AI, eh.
What was Gutenberg's press? A presentient nonmobile robot?
C'mon people...
...like this is just another stab at A.I.? It's hardly a robot of any type according to most standards, but rather a program that has some limited self-awareness?
Even so, the examples don't really seem to indicate self-awareness, as much as a somewhat more robust error diagnosis. BFD. Nice if you can get it, but it's nothing new.
Personally, when I read the headline, I thought of 'robots that don't walk around', which to me describes most real robotics systems...so maybe I was jaded before I read the article.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
I think most of the posters so far are missing the big point. Even having a computer control a function at a water plant still requires a fairly large degree of human supervision. Someone has to make sure the computer is working properly, make sure the control programs don't screw up, and if the programs do screw up, they must fix them. The idea behind immobots seems to take it a bit further than that by actually reducing the amount of control neccessary. I suppose you could say it's just a computer, but then couldn't all things effectivly be reduced to computers (our brains, for exmaple) which certain things in common and certain things different.
The point of this article was that the immobots require almost no human control, whereas a computer still requires a human. Or something like that. Just my 1/2000000000000th of Bill's (estimated) fortune worth.
Posting as directed.
As you can probably see, a lot of these things don't even need IC's to do their job. This article, IMHO, is like saying the wheel was a great invention.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
It's not so much that the machines diagnose the problem(s), that's the easy part, it's that they can independently remedy the situation at hand.
If it doesn't move or cause movement it is not a robot. That is the technical definition of a robot.
:
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) a robot is a machine which can be programmed to perform tasks which involve manipulative and in some cases locomotive actions under automatic control.
The Swedish Industrial Robotics Association defines a robot as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multi-purpose manipulative machine with or without locomotion for use in industrial automation applications.
A robot has three essential characteristics according to the Australian Robotics and Automation Association
It possesses some form of mobility
It can be programmed to accomplish a large variety of tasks
After being programmed or commanded, it operates automatically
Immobot seems to be a short hand for a control loop computer. It is a good one at least in the sense that it generated PR. After all, when was the last time you saw a slashdot article on control loop software systems?
Technically anything that is compulsory labour is a robot, as long as it is artifical
Actually a definition from the dictionary is anything but technical. A dictionary describes day-to-day English usage, not technical usage.
For example, according to the dictionary Venus is a star, more specifically, the morning star, which in day-to-day English usage is correct, but technically is wrong. Technically, Venus is a planet.
I work with robotics everyday, and while its nice to see theories advancing, this method is still not there yet. I don't think that there is enough computing power to take on a very large model. Program complexity, or better object control complexity will grow with each object added, until the time to calculate the correct move in a critical situation would exceed the point of no return.