Robots think 'n sync: a new computer program that allows robots to make decisions averts chaotic work stoppages — an advantage that could benefit everyone from surgeons to air-traffic controllers

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 17, 1999 | by Jennifer Kabbany

At the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a robot handling nuclear waste can stop and think about any unplanned disruptions that interrupt its programmed task -- and even attempt to solve the problem on its own.

"Classically, there have been two ways to control a robot," says Lonnie Love, an engineer-scientist at Oak Ridge. "One way is `automatically' which is great when you know exactly what the robot needs to do. The other way is `teleoperation' which is when a human controls a robot."

In the case of an assembly line, an automatic program stops the robot if its timing is out of sync and restarts it when the system is corrected. Unfortunately, if a robot stops, the whole manufacturing process slips into chaos.

"The good thing we have here is that we don't have to stop the assembly line unless it's really needed," says T.J. Tarn, a professor in the College of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis and leader of the team that developed the computer program that controls robots such as the one at Oak Ridge. "The foreman hates when this happens, so we're trying to help him out with more sophisticated procedures."

The computer program has two parts: data sensing, which helps the robot realize a problem has arisen; and planning and decision-making, which allows it to fix it, explains Mumin Song, who helped develop the software while a graduate student at Washington. Now working at Ford Motor Co. as a technical specialist, Song says that implementing the program would cost about $10 million for each factory floor line.

The program is getting a good deal of attention from companies that rely on robots to build cars, planes, computers and phones and also catching the eye of doctors who perform complicated surgery. "We believe the most important advances will be in the medical field," says Tarn. "The concept at this moment is to have robots do surgery that requires a steady hand." Unexpected problems often arise during surgery, so doctors need robots that can react to "unstructured events."

The program also could assist air-traffic controllers, who frequently experience rerouting problems as a result of late arrivals and bad weather. "Traditionally the air-traffic-control operators would have to interfere and put the rerouting codes in by hand" says Tarn. "But the program we've created would allow that to be done automatically."

The program could be a boon to underwater farming and the oil industry, which rely heavily on robots. Tarn has a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop advanced applications for underwater robots.

RELATED ARTICLE: no time to read? Let a computer do it.

Computer technologies developed for NASA and the CIA can summarize in minutes documents that would take days to read. The Department of Energy has been working on 15 technologies that "visualize" information for scientists, government agencies, businesses, law firms, medical researchers and others.

"Our efforts are aimed at helping people who are overloaded with information and can't find what they need," says Beth Hetzler, senior research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is operated by Battelle. "We want to assist people in getting to the right information that will help them in the least amount of time."

The technology, based on evidence that the human mind rapidly perceives and learns from information conveyed through pictures, works by creating visual images to describe and summarize data. The program Galaxies, for example, uses virtual stars in a night sky to convey the idea of related information. The stars cluster together when documents are closely related; unrelated information is separated by large distances.

Another program, WebTheme, gathers data from the World Wide Web using search terms or links derived from user-specified Web addresses and probes the volumes of textual information. "People are buried under information from the Internet, and this Java-based tool is a great application," says Dennis McQuerry, a Pacific Northwest scientist.

In 1998, the U.S. intelligence community paid $200,000 for development of Topic Islands, a software program that transforms data from large documents into excerpted summaries and visualizations. It recognizes themes and unfolding topics within the document and breaks them down into sections that are easy to understand.

The most developed of the technologies are the Special Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration programs, known as SPIRE, which read and summarize a document, organize the information and create a map of the data on a computer screen. After looking over such summaries, users can type questions to the computer, which in turn highlights related words in the document. When the information from thousands of different documents is combined, patterns and relationships -- some unexpected -- emerge.

Scientists at Pacific Northwest are optimistic about these programs and others in the works. "Right now, we are trying to make the technologies faster and smaller, as far as what it takes to run it," says Rick Littlefield, a senior researcher. "The research always produces results, but some are more or less useful then we hope for." By Marybeth Hart