Volume 32, Number 16 · October 24, 1985
The Golden Arm
By Roger Draper
Robotics
edited by Marvin Minsky
Anchor/Doubleday, 317 pp., $19.95
Work Transformed: Automation and Labor in the Computer Age
by Harley Shaiken
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 306 pp., $17.95
The Robotics Revolution: The Complete Guide for Managers and Engineers
by Peter B. Scott
Basil Blackwell, 345 pp., $24.95
Robots: Machines in Man's Image
by Isaac Asimov, by Karen A. Frenkel
Harmony Books, 246 pp., $19.95
Smart Robots: A Handbook of Intelligent Robotic Systems
by V. Daniel Hunt
Chapman and Hall, 377 pp., $42.50
During the 1960s, researchers at a company now called SRI International built a mobile robot. 'Shakey,' a wheel-driven cart that carried a television camera and a radio link to a separate minicomputer, was designed to move in response to programmed commands. When he received instructions to go from one point in a room to another, for example, the camera would form images of the robot's immediate vicinity. Like printed photographs, such images consisted of dots representing the presence or absence of light. This arrangement of dots was fed into the minicomputer, which 'digitized' it—that is, transformed it into a sequence of ones and zeros. A computer program for recognizing visual patterns compared the new sequence with others previously stored in the computer's memory. If the computer found a match, it 'understood' the robot's position in relation to surrounding objects. This information could then be used by other programs devised to solve simple problems.
Review, 6514 words
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