The technical, managerial, organisational, economic and labour factors found to be important in an empirical study of more than forty firms adopting or considering robots, are outlined. Specific problems, arising from the requirements for managing integrated mechanical, electronic and computational systems, and the novel choreographic approach to production embodied in robots, are posed by the introduction of this new technology. For their effective solution, these problems demand an increased level of competence and expertise, at all levels from the managerial to the technical. But robots are just one part of modern automation, and in the future programmable automation – the integration of computer technology, robotics and conventional automation – will increasingly become the competitive standard in manufacturing industry. The introduction of such new technological standards, though forced by competitive pressures, will, however, require extensive institutional, organisational, and disciplinary adaptation if their full potential is to be realised and the UK is to remain one of the leading industrial nations.

A new robot system has been introduced which was designed to seal the seams of car body panels. The system has nine degrees of freedom, and includes the following features: (1) A seam tracking servo using a solid-state TV camera is mounted at the robot hand to compensate for the seam deviations. (2) The robot arm is equipped with a flexible mechanism at the wrist to provide a wide working range for the seal nozzle. (3) A two axis orthogonal robot carrier is provided to make the robot follow the work on an indexed conveyor during the sealing operation. This paper deals with the structure and operation of the system and presents test results obtained on a sealing line.

This paper outlines a heuristic approach for the development of a control strategy for finding a safe path for a polyhedral object moving amongst known polyhedral objects. This is achieved by the algorithm A* for finding a minimum cost path in a graph; the algorithm is implemented on a computer under the UNIX operating system, using the NU7 version of PROLOG.

The production system has been used extensively in Artificial Intelligence systems due, possibly, to a lack of a prior procedural orientation towards the knowledge embedded within it. As a result, this paradigm is especially useful in modeling domains in which a strong procedural correlation of data would not naturally appear. The production system is therefore an appropriate tool for designing models of systems of independent processes whose interactions can be defined in terms of system state.

We are interested in modeling continuous, concurrent processes for simulating robot activities, and present a description of a system which is capable of representing such processes as symbolic expressions within a production system database. This system implements a world model which acts as a continuous function of time, and a set of rules written in a language capable of specifying time-dependent properties of the model. In addition, rules may specify new rules, thus permitting processes to be mapped out over time as sequences of events.

The methodology presented in this paper is an attempt to utilize the power of symbolic programming in a design for world modeling, and a characterization of the requirements for applying such systems to problem domains which contain a continuous parameter, such as time. We believe that the technique of embedding time used here is appropriate for expressing the dynamic evolution of these models.

This paper describes a primitive environment recognition system for advanced robots. The system can recognize the location, configuration and distribution of 3-D objects in an object space (4m×4m×2.5m) using an ultrasonic imaging method. As an experiment, we have tried to develop the recognition system for the distribution of standing persons. First, this system was tested by mechanical scanning in order to obtain a satisfactory result. Next, we have investigated the electronic scanning method. A transmitter built for testing was composed of twenty-one ultrasonic transducers (40 KHz) built into a 2-D array. The characteristics supported by measurements have agreed well with the theoretical results. Therefore, it has become clear that the ultrasonic imaging system using an electronic scanning method can be applied to environment recognition.