Advanced Robotics

 
An engineer’s first robot is a lot like the first love. Mysterious yet alluring, problematic but desirable an irresistible force of attraction: this Niko Gantry was my first. It was built in Mitchell in Indiana by UTC as part of their major endeavor with Ford Motor Assembly. I got it to build a machine vision guided system for palletizing/de-palletizing turbine compressor blades for the Robots 8 show at Cobo Hall in 1984. I had to develop the communication protocol over RS-232 for the Allen Bradley 8200 Numerical Control. Robots are just machine tools in a fancy dress. This particular one talked like a machine tool with M & G codes. The vision system was a Machine Vision International (MVIC) Genesis 2000 (prototype for the Image Flow Computer whose development cost eventually sunk MVIC). It was a Multibus I based Unix box that ran an 8Mhz Motorola 68000. We had to put 8 clock cycle wait states for every memory/load and store so the processor would not outrun the DMA controller.

Even so it was fast! This was programmed in a mixture of C and C-shell scripting. All the imaging boards in the Genesis were wire-wrapped. The morphological and segmentation algorithms were done in software and were sloooowwwwww……. (20 seconds per location).

Steve (plaid shirt on the right worked for AB). Larry on the left was a TV repairman in Bloomington IN that did the wiring when he wasn’t fixing John Cougar’s Big Screen TV. In 1973 I went to an all night party where John Mellencamp and a friend played and sang acoustic guitar until dawn.

Still it all worked. In 1983 Safeguard funded MVIC and Novell. When I left in 1985 MVIC was bigger than Novell and Silicon Graphics.