Bruce Sterling - Essays. FSF Columns

Robots of this classic sort are vanishingly scarce in 1993. We simply don't have any proper brains for them, and they can scarcely venture far off the drawing board without falling all over themselves. We do, however, have enormous numbers of mechanical robot arms in daily use today. The robot industry in 1993 is mostly in the business of retailing robot arms.

There's a rather narrow range in modern industry for robot arms. The commercial niche for robotics is menaced by cheap human manual labor on one side and by so-called "hard automation" on the other. This niche may be narrow, but it's nevertheless very real; in the US alone, it's worth about 500 million dollars a year. Over the past thirty years, a lot of useful technological lessons have been learned in the iron-arms industry.

Japan today possesses over sixty percent of the entire world population in robots. Japanese industry won this success by successfully ignoring much of the glamorized rhetoric of classic robots and concentrating on actual workaday industrial uses for a brainless robot arm. European and American manufacturers, by contrast, built overly complex, multi-purpose, sophisticated arms with advanced controllers and reams of high-level programming code. As a result, their reliability was poor, and in the grueling environment of the assembly line, they frequently broke down. Japanese robots were less like the SF concept of robots, and therefore flourished rather better in the real world. The simpler Japanese robots were highly reliable, low in cost, and quick to repay their investment.

Although Americans own many of the basic patents in robotics, today there are no major American robot manufacturers. American robotics concentrates on narrow, ultra-high-tech, specialized applications and, of course, military applications. The robot population in the United States in 1992 was about 40,000, most of them in automobile manufacturing. Japan by contrast has a whopping 275,000 robots (more or less, depending on the definition). Every First World economy has at least some machines they can proudly call robots; Germany about 30,000, Italy 9,000 or so, France around 13,000, Britain 8,000 and so forth. Surprisingly, there are large numbers in Poland and China.

Robot arms have not grown much smarter over the years. Making them smarter has so far proved to be commercially counterproductive. Instead, robot arms have become much better at their primary abilities: repetition and accuracy. Repetition and accuracy are the real selling- points in the robot arm biz. A robot arm was once considered a thing of loveliness if it could reliably shove products around to within a tenth of an inch or so. Today, however, robots have moved into microchip assembly, and many are now fantastically accurate. IBM's "fine positioner," for instance, has a gripper that floats on a thin layer of compressed air and moves in response to computer-controlled electromagnetic fields. It has an accuracy of two tenths of a micron. One micron is one millionth of a meter. On this scale, grains of dust loom like monstrous boulders.

CBW Automation's T-190 model arm is not only accurate, but wickedly fast. This arm plucks castings from hot molds in less than a tenth of a second, repeatedly whipping the products back and forth from 0 to 30 miles per hour in half the time it takes to blink.

Despite these impressive achievements, however, most conventional robot arms in 1993 have very pronounced limits. Few robot arms can move a load heavier than 10 kilograms without severe problems in accuracy. The links and joints within the arm flex in ways difficult to predict, especially as wear begins to mount. Of course it's possible to stiffen the arm with reinforcements, but then the arm itself becomes ungainly and full of unpredictable inertia. Worse yet, the energy required to move a heavier arm adds to manufacturing costs. Thanks to this surprising flimsiness in a machine's metal arm, the major applications for industrial robots today are welding, spraying, coating, sealing, and gluing. These are activities that involve a light and steady movement of relatively small amounts of material.

Robots thrive in the conditions known in the industry as "The 3 D's": Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous. If it's too hot, too cold, too dark, too cramped, or, best of all, if it's toxic and/or smells really bad, then a robot may well be just your man for the job!

When it comes to Dirty, Dull and Dangerous, few groups in the world can rival the military. It's natural therefore that military-industrial companies such as Grumman, Martin Marietta and Westinghouse are extensively involved in modern military-robotics. Robot weaponry and robot surveillance fit in well with modern US military tactical theory, which emphasizes "force multipliers" to reduce US combat casualties and offset the relative US weakness in raw manpower.

In a recent US military wargame, the Blue or Friendly commander was allowed to fortify his position with experimental smart mines, unmanned surveillance planes, and remote-controlled unmanned weapons platforms. The Red or Threat commander adamantly refused to take heavy casualties by having his men battle mere machinery. Instead, the Threat soldiers tried clumsily to maneuver far around the flanks so as to engage the human soldiers in the Blue Force. In response, though, the Blue commander simply turned off the robots and charged into the disordered Red force, clobbering them.

This demonstrates that "dumb machines" needn't be very smart at all to be of real military advantage. They don't even necessarily have to be used in battle -- the psychological advantage alone is very great. The US military benefits enormously if can exchange the potential loss of mere machinery for suffering and damaged morale in the human enemy.

Among the major robotics initiatives in the US arsenal today are Navy mine-detecting robots, autonomous surveillance aircraft, autonomous surface boats, and remotely-piloted "humvee" land vehicles that can carry and use heavy weaponry. American tank commanders are especially enthused about this idea, especially for lethally dangerous positions like point-tank in assaults on fortified positions.

None of these military "robots" look at all like a human being. They don't have to look human, and in fact work much better if they don't. And they're certainly not programmed to obey Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. If they had enough of a "positronic brain" to respect the lives of their human masters, then they'd be useless.

Recently there's been a remarkable innovation in the "no-brain" approach to robotics. This is the robotic bug. Insects have been able to master many profound abilities that frustrate even the "smartest" artificial intelligences. MIT's famous Insect Lab is a world leader in this research, building tiny and exceedingly "stupid" robots that can actually rove and scamper about in rough terrain with impressively un-robot-like ease.

These bug robots are basically driven by simple programs of "knee-jerk reflexes." Robot bugs have no centralized intelligence and no high-level programming. Instead, they have a decentralized network of simple abilities that are only loosely coordinated. These robugs have no complex internal models, and no comprehensive artificial "understanding" of their environment. They're certainly not human-looking, and they can't follow spoken orders. It's been suggested though that robot bugs might be of considerable commercial use, perhaps cleaning windows, scavenging garbage, or repeatedly vacuuming random tiny paths through the carpet until they'd cleaned the whole house.

If you owned robot bugs, you'd likely never see them. They'd come with the house, just like roaches or termites, and they'd emerge only at night. But instead of rotting your foundation and carrying disease, they'd modestly tidy up for you.

Today robot bugs are being marketed by IS Robotics of Cambridge, MA, which is selling them for research and also developing a home robotic vacuum cleaner.