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Motivated autonomous robot

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Admin:
Im gonna have to agree with gopher on this . . .

Remember those microwaves that came out 2-3 years ago which you can check your email with for 10 times the price?

Thats why. No one wants to pay a lot extra for features they dont need.

As for manufacturing, its been shown time and time again that for mass production robots are just too expensive and complex. Machines dedicated to just one or two simple tasks outperform robust robots in cost, speed, and quality when it comes to mass manufacture. Robots only perform better than the dumber machines during very short production runs, or production lines that need to be changed often in time.

shurman-a:
The proposal of Gropher "some simple robots and a supervisor computer/robot" is the so called "intelligent flat/house". It is not cheaper than a motivated autonomous household robot but more expensive.
It is very important, that the operations/simple actions of these simple robots are very restricted. They cannot prepare meals, they are even not able to make tee and serve it to a person being in bed. It is impossible to have a specialized robot for each activity which a housemaid does. So the "intelligent flat" cannot be a solution for making household activities.

Admin: As for manufacturing, its been shown time and time again that for mass production robots are just too expensive and complex. Machines dedicated to just one or two simple tasks outperform robust robots in cost, speed, and quality when it comes to mass manufacture. Robots only perform better than the dumber machines during very short production runs, or production lines that need to be changed often in time.

This contradicts the reality; example: cars are mainly manufactured by robots, and therefore cars are relatively cheap.
In opposite to existing robots, the motivated autonomous robot is able to adaptation to a new machine, device, room or new activity. Thus, if a manufacturing line is modified then the motivated autonomous robot can be adapted to these modifications.

But with the autonomous robots new manufacturing possibilities are open; examples: (i) coal mining 2000 m underground done by a staff of motivated autonomous robots, simpler robots and machines (existing robots cannot do it), (ii) a manufacturer which processes chemical substances could be operated and controlled by a staff of full-autonomous robots, simple robots and other machines, (iii) a staff of autonomous robots, not autonomous robots and other machines could mine solid methane located 1000 m underwater, take it into containers and transport it to ships/gas containers oversee. Without full-autonomous robots this cannot be done.

Schurmann/shurman-a

Admin:
Actually, only the assembly process of cars are by robot arms. Everything else, such as manufacture of all parts, are done 100% by dumb highly limited machines  :P

And the arms are required for as I said, "production lines that need to be changed often in time." Car companies change the designs annually.

There is this book on robotic manufacturing automation called Affordable Automation that you may be interested in. I learned a lot myself from it . . . May be worth a look.

Gopher:

shurman-a said:

First: This supervisor program must be implemented in a robot or a computer which must send and receive many many detailed information to and from the supervised simple robots.
Second: Such supervisor program cannot be simple, if the system should work properly and autonomously - it must be intelligent enough to control and operate the simple robots; thus you must develope a supervisor/control program which would be similar to my steering/controlling method in order to operate and control the simple robots intelligently.

I don't agree with the characterization that the supervisor needs to "control and operate" the simple bots; it makes it sound like the other bots are being teleoperated by the supervisor, and that the supervisor needs to understand their jobs. In fact the server needs only to give the most basic information to the bots. It doesn't have to "control" the vacuum, just say "You can go vacuum now" and maybe "Stop and go recharge." Neither of these decisions requires much intelligence or reasoning on the supervisor.

shurman-a said:
Third: Your proposed system of simple robots is neither cheap nor efficient; e.g. it would not be able to operate a washing machine (or you propose a special robot for operating a washing machine?).

No, I propose a washing machine that can be operated through simple wireless instructions. This is not a terribly complicated thing to do, and would have a relatively small impact on the price of an already-digital washing machine. The only remaining tasks would be loading and unloading the machine, which could be handled by a fairly simple "hamper-bot" which has just enough sense to navigate from the bedroom/bathroom (wherever you put it) to the washing machine, and appropriate manipulators to allow it to load the wash, as well as swap clothes from the washer to the dryer. It could be sold as a high-end accessory for the washer/dryer, or even bundled standard.  The only tricky part of this entire process (and by tricky I mean "not easily reducable to a very simple mechanical steps") is folding/hanging clothes. A bot would have to be pretty intelligent to pull out individual garments from a pile, select the appropriate folding or hangar, and put them away in the right place. With a bit of ingenuity, though, I'm sure a relatively simple bot could be designed for even this task; again, it would likely be a high-end accessory sold to those not only too lazy to fold their own clothes, but unwilling to carry them to a laundromat (and if you can afford a 'bot to automate your household chores, you could certainly afford a laundry service!)

I agree there might be a place for these supervisor bots in industrial settings. However, household economics and industrial economics are two very different things; I don't think that household chores are complicated, demanding, or critical enough to justify the complexity of an autonomous humanoid robot. Unlike a factory, 24/7 operation is not necessary or desireable; the range of unexpected situations is larger, but their importance is far lower. If you get home and the dishes aren't completely clean because the 'bot responsible was perplexed by some unexpected connundrum it is unable to deal with, this does not cost anyone money, and is unlikely to hurt you in any significant way. You just straighten it out, remove the obstacle or whatever, and it goes back to what it was doing. Since it takes far less than 24 hours a day to keep a house in perfect order, it will be caught back up in no time. With a set of simple, single-purpose household bots (many of which don't even need to be mobile), then even if the dishwasher bot is stumped or even breaks down completely, then only that task is interrupted; the vaccum bot will still vacuum. The best part is that the separate bots allow for scalability of the level of automation, where your system is an "all-or-nothing" system that requires a huge investment - I imagine a household robot with the level of automation you describe being comparable in price to a luxury car. A total suite of bots to provide the same level of automation might be just as expensive, but it can be bought a piece at a time, the same way we upgrade our appliances.

For a factory/industrial setting, every idle minute can cost real money, and an autonomous factory supervisor who works efficiently 24 hours a day without lunch breaks or vacations could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the factory - which might be just a years' salary for a group of humans to perform the same job. I don't think we're even there yet, but we are getting there. But note that, if the supervisor's job is just to oversee a group of specialized robots, does it really need to be a humanoid either? Surely even in this case, a central computer controller that is just capable of remotely viewing the factory and communicating with the bots wirelessly could do the job as well? If a problem requires action, simple drones can handle it. Say a part slid on a conveyor and is blocking the assembly line. The bots on the line are specialized, and not able to deal with this simple situation. The supervisor gets a signal from one of the bots that there's a problem - "the next part has not arrived" - uses it's cameras and identifies the problem. A command is generated and sent out to a little forklift-bot, which scurries to the scene, grips the object and moves it back to the center of the belt. This bot needs only to be able to navigate to a specified location and move objects. The supervisor could even guide this process using targeting lasers, eliminating the need for these floor drones to be independently capable of sophisticated visual processing (paint the obstruction, so the bot can see and identify it, then paint the place it should put the object) A body, humanoid or otherwise, would increase the cost and complexity, and decrease the reliability, of the supervisor, without seeming to provide much added benefit, Seems better to just wire the entire facility with a variety of sensors and cameras, so that in effect the entire factory structure is the supervisor bots' "body." In effect, though, this reduces the supervisor to just another specialized robot; it doesn't do much of anything, it simply collects information and turns it into instructions, which the other specialized 'bots know how to execute. I may be wrong, but this seems to be within the range of an expert system, and not one really requiring what I think of as an "autonomous" robot at all?

Your examples of applications for autonomous robots all have one very important difference from a typical factory: they're all in settings where it is expensive, dangerous, or outright impossible for human workers to go. This is not true of the typical factory, and so the extra cost is not justified.

A final note: I use the word "robot" very inclusively, to describe any machine which operates itself, however simple and limited it's function; I point this out because Admin seems to use a stricter standard,  not including most of these simple mechanisms as "robots."

Admin:

--- Quote ---I use the word "robot" very inclusively, to describe any machine which operates itself, however simple and limited it's function; I point this out because Admin seems to use a stricter standard,  not including most of these simple mechanisms as "robots."
--- End quote ---

Its generally accepted that no two people can agree on the definition of a robot. I cant even agree with my own definition! But when I talk about robots, I refer to what the general (possibly uninformed) public percieves as a robot. Basically, if it cant battle Arnold Schwarzenegger, then its not a true robot  :P

The components in a washing machine are no different from whats in any robot, and it falls in the mechatronics category like other robots. But I think most people wont call it a robot unless they can see 'life' or a 'personality' coming from it, and that its capable of moving from a stationary position on its own. I guess I want to lean to that definition myself because frankly, washing machines un-glorify my hobby  :P

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