Artificial Intelligence ?

At the beginning of the 1980's the lines began to blur between practical factory automation and R&D drivers in the robot manufacturing sector.

The VAL controller had been adopted by the academic fraternity and was running in the majority of labs throughout the industrial world. VAL introduced computer control over machine movements and graduates were not slow to explore every aspect of machine intelligence.

For the first time 'react' and 'reacti' instruction sets enabled real time feedback from analogue sensors to develop interactive force feedback and vision systems. The controller was popular and easy to use as the VAL language was similar to 'basic'.

Expert Systems were conceived and machine logic was taken beyond simple equipment cycle initiation and part manipulation, signal handshaking and safety Interlocks. Universities began work on self learning logic systems which were capable of operating on a rule and priority basis, with the ability to generate their own rules based on the unexpected happening.

Graduates came out of University with an expectation of development opportunities in industry. Unfortunately this expectation spilled over into mainstream industrial installations resulting in overcomplicated programming and debugging problems on site, resulting in unmanageable application software and difficulties regarding reliability and stability. There was little generic value in application specific software products around this time.

Control hardware reflected the needs of the academicians and control development became high risk. Controllers became more expensive and many expensive options were developed with little practical application potential. Obviously there was some healthy spin off but prices and subsequent cost effectiveness came into question.

A worthwhile analogy would be the employment of a graduate to carry out a repetitive job. Employers would rather use an uneducated worker with low expectations rather than overpay an over skilled operative. Controllers were now capable of many different tasks but in a simple 'pick & place' all the added intelligence would be redundant, but add to product cost.