Robotics article for 1Don

[Islandman]

Well in some cases the technology is immature, but in other cases the technology is ready but the society not ready for it yet.

Driverless cars is an example of the second case. The technology is just about there, but society not ready for it yet.. While there will be technical problems I have no doubt that very soon they will be safer than human drivers in the majority of situations. The driverless car will not drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs, will not have problems when texting and driving, and won't be looking at the sexy girl in the next car while driving. It also won't have a blind spot and other limitations that human drivers have.

Most likely it will happen gradually, where with each new car model more and more aspects of driving will be automated. People more comfortable with that approach.

[Islandman]

Never say never. With enough time almost anything is possible

[Tilla]

Strictly speaking it is more of a product replicator than a printer, but eventually they won't cost much more than a printer costs today. That is the breakthrough.

I judge some high school robotics competitions where the youths them already making some of the parts with a 3-D printer.

The term 3D printing is used as it works similar to current day inkjet printer. It however builds a 3D part by continuously building layers upon layers to replicate the 3D model data sent from a CAD program. It is the closest one gets to touch and feel of a solid model on a computer screen then some time after having a replica of the part in your hand where you can feel it without going through expensive tooling and long leadtimes for parts. With 3D printing, you can lock in that the design is good even before you spend thousands on tooling for parts. Ths makes a whole lot of difference for those of us who are involved in designing, manufacturing and bringing new products to market.

I think I saw where M&Ms was saying they could be using 3D printing in manufacturing some of their products in the future.

[Tilla]

Thank you sir! Some people do not appreciate the cost to produce a part when you have to do tooling. Hey, depending on the complexity of a part, one could spend upwards of 80 to 100,000 on tooling. This technology allows you to fine tune the product and have part on hand you can verify meets design criteria before you commit to such time and expenses.

The use for commercial part manufacturing though is not something I was saying we are ready to do just now. The 3D printing process takes a long time and cannot match today's methods of manufacturing certain parts. Say if you were to do the housing for a hand held power drill, one could tool up for injection molding where you can run thousands of parts a day. 3D printing now would take hours to produce one of those parts. So yes, the next step is to get the speed of 3D printing up and using production quality materials for parts.

The savings I am speaking about is as you have said, is realized well before you get to the commercial manufacturing of parts. This helps the engineer to design better parts as he can experiment with different configurations and have parts to review much more cheaply than going the standard route.

[Islandman]

Yes I can see where eventually it could be used for certain types of manufacturing.

Where things get really interesting and futuristic though is possible use of the technology to produce unique items like tailor-made artificial body parts, where you might only create a handful of each design.

Once technology gets cheap enough a lot of applications which were impractical or not even thought about before become possible and commercially viable.

[Tilla]

The body parts thing is interesting. Imagine being able to recreate a person's heart using some of their own cells and using the heart created to replace one which is functioning badly. The possibilities are endless. As you rightly said, situations where you do not need to mass produce something, 3D printing will make a world of difference.

[HL]

The talk is that our business will be offering 3D printing service soon.....

[Assasin]

When you have some experience in supporting these technology you worry about the effects of the bugs involved, the misuse, the overselling of it and malfunction. When technology is involved in the critical field of life and death one has to be careful. Seen recently where technical machine malfunction and killed someone I knew. A lot of investigation took place and this machine was approved by the state, and its support tech, but it malfunctioned once in a while and ended in a death.

While I support these critical technology I more on the reserve side and want them truly tested and vented as in the case of the driverless car. I still think the best option right now is to have a driver make some critical decisions. Right now technological malfunction in cars are very common as they put more chips and circuit boards.

[Tilla]

Sass, would the person have died without the machine or the machine was expected to save his life but it malfunctioned and he died? I mean, in every facet of life, things fail. Surgeons make mistakes every day and people die maybe even more so than the one remote incident you cite. It is unfortunate that that happened, but I am sure if you were to analyze the statistics on patients dying at the hands of doctors vs as a result of machine failure, you would find that the doctors cause more death everyday as a result of human error. My apologies to the doctors on the site.

Cars are more reliable today because of improvements in technology. I think in the very near future, you will come to realize that technology will create more reliable and trustworthy drivers than humans. Will tech malfunction or fail at times? Of course it will, as nothing is 100% error/failure proof! Components in electronics can fail and as much as we try, software are developed by humans and they can malfunction (have bugs) at times. I can tell you though that technology will not cause the amount of accidents, death and mishaps as human error does.

I visited a plant here in KC last week and had a tour of the assembly of an electronic device that is being done completely by robots. The rate at which the robots do the assembly, it cannot be matched by humans! I mean, robots use cameras in their vision systems to check orientation of parts, and do the assembly repetitively, quicker and more efficiently than any human can. It is really interesting and I have the opportunity to join this company but certain things are preventing me from making the commitment at this time. For one, it is a 24 hour a day 7 day a week operation and it could require me to work nights sometimes. My policy is that nighttime is for sleeping.

Anyway, I know you are not going to agree with me and I see you as a man who have a technology phobia. We have to embrace it though as it improves the way we will do things in a lot of areas. You would be surprised at how error prone us humans are. We get fatigued after so many hours doing certain basic repetitive tasks we will do them incorrectly. Come on Sass, come over to the intelligent machine side. . .

[Assasin]

"Anyway, I know you are not going to agree with me and I see you as a man who have a technology phobia. We have to embrace it though as it improves the way we will do things in a lot of areas. You would be surprised at how error prone us humans are. We get fatigued after so many hours doing certain basic repetitive tasks we will do them incorrectly. Come on Sass, come over to the intelligent machine side. ."

Come on Tilla "phobia". No I support technology and the productivity that it brings but when machines are entering the "thinking and human reaction phase" and not the automation phase, it has to be right. On the Quality Control side, I may just be wary of the amount of bad products I have seen that has not lived up to expectation. On the support and consumer side it maybe critical when you have to deal with life and death situation.

I am a little skeptical of the hype and push that sometimes surround some of these product. Yes my skepticism and demands have sent many a big brains back to the drawing board, hopefully to come with a better product.
My policy is that nighttime is for sleeping. or .

[Tilla]

On the Quality Control side, I may just be wary of the amount of bad products I have seen that has not lived up to expectation. On the support and consumer side it maybe critical when you have to deal with life and death situation.

I see you have conveniently skirted around my question in my previous post. Again, did the machine kill the guy or its malfunction of the machine resulted in the guy's death?

Also, you totally ignored my point about human error in causing deaths. As you may know, robotics now used in surgery and the intent is for it to help the medics perform some operations more accurately and efficiently than the human can.

With respect to quality control, there is quality control and there is quality control. But then, that is totally another subject.

[Assasin]

It was actually a girl but the machine malfunction and caused her death. Can't go in details here.

Yeah human error cause death but I think the best combination is to use the technology to work with humans(assist them). In many cases you will still need that human touch for good or bad.

[Islandman]

Many things do work best with human-machine partnership, at least until the technology is perfected.

One interesting development I have read about is with a form of chess called freestyle chess , where a human player can get assistance from a computer chess program. What they have found is that even though the best chess programs can now easily beat the best humans in a one-on-one game, in freestyle chess certain human-computer combinations can still beat the best computer programs.

Even that has its limits though, as the expectation is that eventually the best chess programs will have enough processing power and "intelligence" to to beat any combination of human and computer, that is the human won't add any value to the team.

That's why I say that automation tends happen gradually, but mostly likely our children (maybe even us) will see the day when they call a taxi and it will come to their house and blow the horn without any driver inside.

[Tilla]

It was actually a girl but the machine malfunction and caused her death. Can't go in details here.

You do not have to go into details. Just trying to know something. Was she in a critical state prior to the machine malfunction? In other words, without the machine, would she have died if she did not have help?

Yeah human error cause death but I think the best combination is to use the technology to work with humans(assist them). In many cases you will still need that human touch for good or bad.

In the foreseeable future, there is always going to be human/machine interaction in doing things better. Doctors currently interact with the robots they use in surgery, the machines do not work on their own.

A self driven car will have some interaction from a human. Although I can see the machine intelligence being used to carry out more of the mundane tasks in driving. The car of the future will be able to use technology to have depth perception of its surroundings which will be thousands of times better than your best drivers. On top of that, vision systems and sensors will feed information to computers at a rate which will allow the computer to make decisions and take evasive action when necessary. Can it malfunction? If course it can, but I am sure that it will more likely have a much higher reliability in getting you from one point to the next than the human driver.

[Tilla]

That's why I say that automation tends happen gradually, but mostly likely our children (maybe even us) will see the day when they call a taxi and it will come to their house and blow the horn without any driver inside.

I think I posted on here about a month ago where it was either Audi or BMW that have this new car which you do not need to use valet parking. The car will take off and park itself, and on receiving a signal when you are ready, will return to the pickup point to pick you up. All this is done without a driver. So yes, it is coming.