Curious?????

All industrial robots are either of the 'pick and place' variety found
in manufacturing or are teloperation of machinery. I have never seen
anything that 'learned' from the mistakes it made. In fact the robotic
operations are so critical that a machine can't afford the luxury to
learn about its environment.

Mining and mineral processing use teleoperation to some extent, and
possibly more so in the future as it becomes more difficult to keep
humans in the deeper holes in the ground.

Bill

--- In spacesettlers@y..., "Dr. Omni" wrote:
> From: Ed Minchau
> To:
> Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 2:03 PM
> Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Curious?????
>
> [snikt]
> > Robots controlled by expert systems do not work in unstructured
> > environments, but a robot with a control system based on fuzzy
logic,
> > neural nets, and genetic algorithms can be _taught_ to work in
poorly-
> > defined environments. I have been working on an autonomous
robotics
> > project for ten years, and I should have a proof-of-concept model
> > ready later this year (2 fully autonomous serpentine robots, also
> > capable of teleoperated semi-autonomous mode).
> >
> I don't now your research and I therefore I can emit no opinion
about it.
> However, since you mentioned connectionist/evolutionary
approaches... This
> fuss about neural nets, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms has
lasted for
> the past 20 years and so far I've seen those techniques applied just
to
> toyish academic problems, when it comes to Robotics: robots that run
thourgh
> rooms avoiding boxes, robots that follow tape patterns glued in the
walls,
> and so far. I have no knowledge of robots in real industrial
applications
> (such as mining) using those connectionist/evolutionary approaches
to
> actively manipulate unstructured environents without human
supervision. (If
> you do know something like that, I would greatly appreciate any
references
> that you ca present.) And although I agree that in *theory* that can
be
> accomplished, the near stagnation in that field makes me doubt that
this
> accomplishment will occur in a foreseeable future.
>
> Therefore, I would invest in sending human miners to asteroids. They
could
> operate telepresence rigs to do the excavations (which would improve
their
> safety), but use of robotics would be limited to that. Conversely,
you can
> drag an asteoroid to HEEO and tele-mine it from Earth itself.
>
> > :) ed
> >
> ;) lcio
>
> P.S.: I hope that you are not thinking that I'm one of those hard AI
types
> who hate neural nets and evolutionary computing... In fact, I think
that
> those techniques are great and have many successful domains of
real-world
> application; I've been working with them since 1993. I just think
that
> Robotics, from the commercial/industrial standpoint, is not one of
those