Posted: 9:00 p.m. EST, 2/18/98

WASHINGTON -- Their sci-fi image notwithstanding, robots have proven their real-world utility for performing myriad tasks deemed too onerous, dangerous or repetitive for humans-from Pathfinder's Mars mission to toxic-waste cleanups to automation of semiconductor fabs. Robotics has even conquered the networking realm, with remote-controlled tasks conducted over the Internet.

The United States pione ered much of the technology in use today and is not lacking in robotics expertise. Nonetheless, it finds itself playing catch-up in the global robotics market, notably with the Japanese. To revive the laggard domestic industry, manufacturers and research labs have asked Congress to formulate policies and offer financial incentives to encourage R&D.

"We've lost the game with Japan so far," conceded Joseph Engelberger, chairman of Help Mate Robotics Inc. (Danbury, Conn.). "But I say 'Bully for them, shame on us,' because all the technology for robotics came from the U.S."

Analysts estimate the robotics industry at $8 billion worldwide and expect the segment eventually to rival the automobile and computer industries in generated dollars and jobs. In December, the industry put on a small-scale expo for Congress to troll for federal support that would allow the United States to reestablish prominence in the field. Afterward, Rep. Robert Franks (R-N.J.) called robotics "a cutting-edge area of th e world's economy" in which "America has every opportunity to dominate, if we draw on the resources of government agencies."

Tooling around Mars
"Robots are, in effect, our technological children," said Mark Rosheim, a Minneapolis-based robotics expert. One of the most precocious of those "children" was Sojourner, the 25-pound, six-wheeled, Mars-hopping darling of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Rover program. This past summer, Sojourner transmitted more than 500 images back home to NASA scientists as it negotiated the Red Planet's harsh terrain.

"Just designing and building the Pathfinder lander and rover was a very exciting time, because we were chartered to set a new standard for doing dramatic, low-cost missions and eliminate massive engineering studies," said William Layman, chief engineer of JPL's Microrover Flight Experiment Division.

Sojourner's "guts" were low-tech. A 0.22-square-meter solar panel, comprising 13 strings of 18 GaAs cells, drove the rover at 1 0 W. Components were designed to survive Martian temperatures (from 8ýF to 130ýF) in a warm electronics box.

Sojourner's computer board used a radiation-hardened Intel 80C85 CPU running at the underwhelming speed of 2 MHz. And the memory capacity of the machine NASA nicknamed "the little robot that could" was 672 kbytes.

The telecommunications hardware consisted of slightly upgraded off-the-shelf radios and Motorola radio modems that used the RTS/CTS handshake method (similar to that used by PC modems). Transmitted radio waves between NASA and Sojourner traveled at 2.9979245 x 108 meters/second, so it took 10 minutes and 39 seconds for a radio signal to travel in one direction between Earth and Mars.

Designed for only seven days of work, Sojourner lasted over 80. A new model, slated for 2001 will "be larger, have the capability to travel farther, last a year on Mars, and even store Martian-surface materials for future pickup," said JPL's Layman.

Rosheim, president of 10 -year-old Ross-Hime Designs Inc. (Minneapolis) and creator of a number of "technological children," takes his cue from da Vinci's anatomical studies in designing robots that mimic the human body's flexibility as faithfully as possible. The inventor's Omni-Wrist has been used in over 100 spray-finishing robots used by the auto industry; has been miniaturized by NASA's JPL for use as a micro-surgery robot; and was purchased for incorporation in JPL's hazardous waste robot, or Hazbot.

The new apple of Rosheim's eye is his 43-axis Robotic Surrogate, an an "anthrobot, or "mechanical man," that has been selected for a role in upcoming Space Shuttle missions.

The Robotic Surrogate exhibits the full range of motion of the upper torso. Its muscles, replacing da Vinci's cable system, are mounted with sensors to detect position and force.

Other robotics efforts seek to duplicate NASA's robotics success in the commercial world. The National Robotics Engineering Consortium (NREC), a joint ven ture of NASA and Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute (CMRI), has converted a number of defense robotics technologies to commercial versions. Its robots include the machines that cleaned up Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear reactor after its near-meltdown in 1979; FastNav (sponsored by Caterpillar), an automated system for driving around strip mines; and Dante II, a 10-foot-tall, 1,700-pound automaton that explored active Alaskan volcano Mount Spurr.

A new NREC robot, Pioneer, is slated to explore the radioactive ruins of Ukraine's Chernobyl Unit 4 nuclear reactor. Pioneer will map radiation, temperature and humidity; acquire samples of concrete structures for engineering analysis; and make 3-D maps of the building interior.

"Under guidelines established for radiation workers in the U.S. and Ukraine, a person would receive his annual dose in such a place in 18 seconds," noted Jim Osborn, senior project scientist at CMRI and principal investigator on the Pioneer project.

Th e semiconductor industry is also moving swiftly to incorporate the power of robotics. In the case of IC fabrication, where even the slightest contamination can ruin a product, manufacturers are becoming dependent on clean-running robots.

Humans cannot stay in a Class 1 clean room [1 particle/cubic foot] for more than a few minutes without jeopardizing the facility's cleanliness. But manufacturers don't want $700 million of equipment per facility to sit idle nearly 70 percent of the time. They'd rather see the tools operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

IC manufacturing in an ultra-clean environment can involve upward of 200 discrete steps, noted Mitchell Weiss, vice president of technology for PRI Automation Inc. (Billerica, Mass.). "Only through the use of extensive automated systems can the complex process be managed while attaining acceptable yields," he said.

"Today, robots are typically handling wafers in environments cleaner than Class 1," Weiss added. And the "task of carrying the new 300-mm wafer carriers, which will weigh nearly 20 pounds, is too difficult for human operators to do continuously." Robots can be expected to handle the chore.

Robots on the Net
Robots are also moving into Internet arena, where they are remotely controllable over a standard Net connection. Net users can connect to servers at Stanford University, the Penn State Telerobotic Observatory and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and remotely operate telescopes, cameras and robotic arms. And the Telerobot Web project at the University of Western Australia in Perth offers a Java interface for control of an in-house robot at the Automation Lab.

Even more remarkable, though not yet Internet-ready, is virtual surgery, which can now be performed by robots controlled remotely. Hajime Inoue, a professor at Okayama University's Orthopedics Department, recently demonstrated robot ic surgery at a meeting of the Japan Operation Medicine Society. Inoue successfully manipulated a robot in Okayama from a Tokyo University lab room located 700 kilometers away. The robot passed a tiny thread through an artificial blood vessel measuring less than 1 millimeter in diameter.

The near future for robotics development holds several challenges for technologists from many different disciplines. For Layman and the NASA JPL team, work on the various rover projects will continue to entail communications among engineering specialists in telecommunications, mechanical, thermal and mobility subsystems control and navigation, and power subsystems.

To ease the burden in the Pathfinder project, Layman related, "we had to put the rover's 'sandbox' right outside the control-software and hardware engineers' offices, so they really had an immediate physical feel for how their designs functioned and for what needed improvement on-the-fly."

While developing the 2001-model rover, Layman' s team has been concurrently working on a huge shuttle-mounted radar that is slated to make high-quality topographic maps of the Earth's surface over a period of 10 days in 1999.

Rosheim is readying his Robotic Surrogate to perform several automated functions in the upcoming international space station. The robot may also eventually be used for automatically constructing base camps on other planets.

While he conceded that the technology of anthrobotics is "new and for the most part unexplored," Rosheim said that artificial-intelligence designers are coming up with applications for near-future implementation. "AI people are trying to make a system that does not have mathematical or physical singularities that drive their computers crazy," he said.

Rosheim added that his company has begun work on a DOD contract to transfer his patented universal joint technology to antenna and other sensor-mount applications. He claimed that "several breakthroughs in cost and simplicity have alread y been made."

For Osborn at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, the Chernobyl project demands upgrading the Pioneer robot on the spot as it negotiates the area. "We have to place Pioneer in the most challenging area of the building. It's difficult terrain; there's intense radiation and a wide variation in the dimensions of the objects to be mapped," he noted.

In fabrication automation, one big challenge is logistics, according to Weiss of PRI Automation. He noted that wafers travel more than six miles during the production process.

The overall manufacturing process of a factory running multiple products is so complex that it can only be controlled by computers," he said. "By combining these computers with robotics, we improve the operating efficiency of the factory. With a typical new semiconductor factory costing over $1 billion, this is a significant issue."

Weiss sees PRI moving into the "back end" of semiconductor manufacturing: test, assembly and packaging. "We b elieve that automation will be used throughout the silicon value chain, from production of the raw silicon wafers, through chip manufacturing, to pc-board assembly and final-product assembly and test."

Weiss also finds that "snippets" of AI technology are already being used throughout the robotics industry. He cited a need for finding workable computing techniques, such as search algorithms, to enable the shortest robotic path through a factory.

Weiss doesn't see the emergence of the "robotic design engineer" anytime soon. "It'll be a long time before I see a robot vision system reading a copy of EE Times ," he quipped. But "we all know how much more productive we are with the computing tools we have to do the 'drudge work,' while we do the more creative design work."

Sojourner chief engineer Layman said robotics development looks to grow exponentially and quickly. "Our Sojourner design team was deep in engineers who had invested their careers in developing robotic technolo gy," he said. "It's such a fascinating arena; how could any engineer not be interested in robotics?"

  Go to This Week's News

Free Subscription to EE Times First Name Last Name Company Name Title Email address   Click here for your Free Subscription to EETimes Europe