A Slice of Life
Bill Lites
The military is developing unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), which are an upgraded form of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), that can perform a wide variety of missions, including combat. UCAVs are now being designed which will have the ability to fly themselves, pick their own course and target, and to make most decisions on their own. How scary is that?
Almost every unmanned space probe ever launched could be considered a robot of one type or another. Those launched in the early 1960s were very limited in their abilities, but more recently their ability to fly, land, survey and take samples on foreign planets is an indication of the advancement of robotic technology.
Another example of the use of robotics is in the dairy industry. I just received an email about the dairy farm in Fair Oaks, Indiana that uses computer assisted robotics to process (feed & milk) their approximately 32,000 cows per day, to produce enough milk for 8 million people. As part of the daily processing, a transponder that is attached to each cow, reads and records the amount and quality of the milk from that cow, as it is automatically milked. Also, a pedometer is attached to each cow that records the distance the cow travels in each 24-hour period.
Due to the hazardous nature of mining operations, in particular underground mining, the prevalence of autonomous, semi-autonomous, and tele-operated robots has greatly increased in recent years. A number of vehicle manufacturers provide autonomous trains, trucks and loaders that will load material, transport it from the mine site to its destination, and unload it without requiring human intervention.
Robots in healthcare have two main functions. Those which assist an individual, such as a person with a disability or a sufferer of a disease, and those which aid in the overall operation and processing of such industries as pharmaceutical companies and many hospitals systems.
—–To Be Continued—–
Old Things R New 