Warren Buffett is a blow hard, and rather than keep his comments to areas where he has expertise like long term buy and hold strategies, he moves into an area where he has no expertise, like economics. Warren got his degree more than 50 years ago in the classic Keynesian crap that is taught at most universities around the world.  His large personal fortune makes people look to him for wisdom, as if money conveyed that. The Protestant Epic reified: more money, more wisdom. This can make his advice dangerous if heeded. Albert Einstein was a genius in physics yet a fool in economics. I do not appreciate Warren’s economic nostrums because they are dangerous and here is why.

We’ll start with 2 purported facts: in 2006 he was worth 62 billion USD (Forbes) and at the end of 2008 he was worth 37 billion USD (Wikipedia) which is a net loss of some 25 billion USD making him one of the greatest losers in investment circles. When Warren loses a dollar that loss propagates to every stockholder in Berkshire Hathaway. So another 25 billion or more equity evaporate and go to “money heaven”, pushing him ahead of  that alleged thief Bernie (Scumbag) Madoff.

Warren has done well for himself, but not as well as he could have. His comments on derivatives indicate that he just does not understand them, which is not surprising given how little he values math beyond high school algebra in his public comments. Still I never heard the Wizard of Omaha talking about luck. He has been a savvy investor for most of his career, but luck has been a huge, if not gargantuan factor as well. Warren was lucky to have a businessman father that became a congressman at just the right time for Warren to get introductions into the right circles. This is something most of us, the benighted masses, cannot rely on. In computer engineering terms this is not a scalable solution.

Of late Warren the Wizard has been a complete dunce. I am not talking about the topological dunce cap, but rather the stick your nose in corner and sit quietly on a stool kind, since 2006. If I were amongst his shareholders I would have recommended to fire him. In 2006 I publicly made the call that the housing market was tanking and gold was skyrocketing based on nothing more than reading a couple of Ludwig Von Mises books (Socialism & Omnipotent government)  see: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/giles3.html. You can get these at http://www.mises.org for free along with Human Action the magnum opus of human nature and relationships.

When all your co-workers are talking about investments  and you are not working at investment firm or bank then a bubble is forming and popping courtesy of John Maynard Keynes.

Warren is a closet socialist who will most likely lose or squander his fortune faster than he made it (pretty much the way it always seems to go ). Given his losses of late I cannot see why anyone would want his advice, unless it is on corporate tax avoidance through tax loss carry forwards. Not exactly the stuff that CEO’s are supposed to be made of.

Clearly Warren does not understand economics, history, or financial mathematics. Had the “Wizard” known any one of these three subjects he could have done better than losing the tens of billions of his own and other people’s money.

Bill Gates is a bona-fide genius. He has restructured the face of computing worldwide through his creative talents. He also had some luck; like being born into a family that valued education, placed him in exclusive private schools, raised him in a surrounding that valued intellectual creativity and freedom. It was also luck that  soon after he bought an operating system his mother “knew” the Chairman of the Board at IBM just when they were looking for an x86 architecture based operating system and made the introductions. The rest, as they say, is history. Bill would have done well had he heeded my advice in 2006 as well. Still not a scalable solution for the rest of us.

As an investment adviser I have done pretty well, even thought I remain mum most of them time. I got my brother out of Silicon Graphics in 1994 when the stock was at $40 USD, I put him in around 10. I put him into Apple when it was $15, among other buy orders. Still he did not take my advice to triple mortgage his house and go long on RAMBUS on opening day 1997 and works instead of retiring in opulence.

Why do I make such excellent market calls?  It is simple I understand a little about economics, a lot more about the computer business, and I do not trade stocks. I have 2 shares of GM that were given to me when I worked their more than 25 years ago. I left Michigan and the automotive business in 1989 because it was clear to me that that particular train was going off the tracks.

If JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, or Nathan Rothschild were alive today they would be aghast at the concept of trading in stocks. A stock or an equity position was investment; you bought a share once, and it paid dividends forever or at least until old age and death intervened.  You only sold when it stopped paying dividends or  the P/E ratio was not what it should (typically a precursor to not paying dividends). One did not buy stocks in companies that lost money or did not pay dividends. If you were a General Manager/President ( the term CEO did not exist in the lexicon of their day) that lost Morgan, Rockefeller, or Rothschild money it would only happen once. Job jumping one step ahead of the ax was just not tolerated.

If you follow my advice, stay liquid through debt avoidance. Put 10% in gold coins as a hedge, split the rest into thirds: 1/3 to buy and hold stocks in firms that consistently pay dividends, 1/3 on high quality bonds and the remaining 1/3 in money market funds. If your broker is calling you with advice give him a warning, that if he does it again you will fire him. If he does call a second time, then fire him.

If at any time you are uncertain about major market swings sell everything and be liquid. I would recommend swiss francs with a major non-US bank. Keep your 10% gold regardless, if nothing else it will be a lesson in discipline, plus it looks nice. This is good advice because I do not buy or sell stocks and thus have no vested interest, unlike Warren, Bill, or Allen (I will rot in Hell for what I have done) Greenspan.

Remember: “finance is what you do with your own money, economics is what the government does with everybody’s money”.  What governments do with it is almost invariably bad, they waste it, lose it by making bad investments with crooked friends, destroy wealth of others thanks to the War Department, or inflate it away to nothingness.

P.S. Money Heaven is a place that does not exist so when your money goes there it no longer exists. Too many people believe that money is lost when you buy a stock which then declines in value and the subsequent sale at the depreciated price is when the loss appears, but this is not true. The loss occurs when you buy the stock at a point in time when you could have done something else like stuff it in your mattress, buy gold, put it in your child’s piggy bank, or purchase something in value like a used car. This little facade is what keeps the whole charade going. Profits and losses then will be in the future rather than in the present.

“We need banking, we don’t need banks.” – Management Guru Tom Peters 2001

“Never let a banker go.” Dan Aykroyd 1985 in the movie Nothing But Trouble

Res Ipso Loquitur

Tom Bunch – Tool Design

Joe Bracken – Finite Element Analysis

Steve Brolliar – Finite Element Anlysis

George Giles – Software Architect and Program Manager

Jim Harris – Electrician

Darryl Hathaway – CAD Design

Jeff Knudson – Simulation

Matt Laughlin – Robot and AGV Software

George Meringer – Manufacturing Engineer (RIP)

Don Merrifield – Mechanical Design

Cliff Mitchell – Process Development and Certification

Tom Rogers – Process Sensor

James Walker – Autopath and Laser Sensor Software

Doug Wester – Project Manager

Dr. Maurice Lande – Consultation

Dr. Ric Guptil – Consultation

Dr. John Craig – Consultation

The photo above shows the U100 scara in the right elbow configuration.

The U100 scara is capable of linear motion from its’ tool centerpoint. The scara positioner has a left elbow and a right elbow solution motion for linear Cartesian motion. The robot cannot move between solution manifolds in linear motion. The jacobian becomes zero at this point and is in the denominator of the differential position calculation which is thus infinite. As the robot approaches this singular point the velocities of the joints get faster and faster for smaller and smaller incremental positions. At the singularity they would be infinite so obviously that is not a realizable condition physically. To traverse between manifolds the robot must move in joint motion and stay well away from the singularity.

The P160 robot has six solution manifolds. The second rotational axis can be either up or down (it is up in the above picture). The third rotational axis can either forward or backwards (it is forward in the above photo), and the wrist can be either up or down (it is down in the picture above). The diligent reader should try to imagine what the opposite manifolds would look like and determine if they are physically useful for robotic operation.

The Fanuc P-160 robot is pictured in the above simulation in an up-forward-down solution space. The P-160 has the exact same kinematic configuration except the Denavit-Hartenberg parameters are different. It is an excellent exercise in forward kinematics to put this type of a robot in DH format.

The “Hadi Akeel” wrist on this family of robots is offset from the centerline of the motion axis. The final three axes do not intersect in a single point thus there is no closed form solution for the inverse kinematics of this type of robot. Rodney Piper provided this in the late 60′s for a PhD thesis. Dr. Charles Wampler has an excellent book on methods of solutions of robots of this type using muli-polynomial resultants. When this system was created this was not a feasible solution because the computation needs to be run in a few milliseconds in leaner motion. However with today’s high speed multi-core CPU’s it is probably a tractable solution.

Every point in linear motion for the combined scara and P160 device had an infinite number of solutions, so constraints had to be generated to get realistic solutions. The algorithm developed is very similar to they was in which a human being (also a highly redundant manipulator) approaches points in space without going “singular”. The mathematics of the biomechanics of humanoid manipulators is covered in detail in the excellent book by Ivancevic et al.

It is an excellent exercise to figure out what manifolds are practical for processing as constraints and those that are useless. The answer will depend on what kind of work piece is being processed robotically. Hint: you might not want to approach a tool centerpoint on the surface of a $100 million dollar airframe from inside the airframe. The controller will have no problem with this, but the owner of the aircraft certainly will.

It is filled with nice images and it documents the technique quite well. Perceptron and Diffracto have used this technique for more than 2 decades to calibrate their sensors for their automotive assembly body-in-white gauges that virtually automobile space frames are now made with. Perceptron now makes a cloud fitting reverse engineering product called Scan Works that makes use of the surface mapping techniques and this tool transformation algorithm.

I had a 3 meter standoff 3 meter ambiquity LIDAR sensor manufactured in 1992 for 3D surface mapping of large objects. This system also used a derivative of the tool center point calibration algorithm. The sensor because of it size was fixture mounted in the test workcell. By moving a tool (we actually had the exact same pointer tool made to .001 inch tolerance for calibration) with a robot the sensor was transformed into a metric space that was usable. The LIDAR sensors were very expensive, and relatively fragile due to the rotating polygonal mirrors that generated the 3-D data cloud. The optical “telescope” that generated the phase shift that was calibrated was prone to drift from mechanical vibration and temperature variations. They were never made in high enough volume to be a successful commercial product. Odetics in Anaheim CA also made a family of these scanners that were slight more accurate, better designed, smaller and lighter with an active temperature control in the sensor head for minimizing “telescope” problems. They were discontinued in the early ’90′s for the same reason. A good highly accurate 2-D scanner attached to a robot arm gave equally good data at the expense of calibration, motion and tool changing.

Johan Hallenberg did an excellent job in documenting his technique the thesis is very readable, sorry that it is not new. You can download it here. He also implemented the vision algorithms using the Intel OpenCV open source product. It runs very nicely in Ch interpreter from softintegration for those of you that want to script in ANSI C.

The solver took me a calendar year of development. It was improved from 1 second per path point prototype written in Sil to 100 nanoseconds per path point written in C++ including full redundancy. All Fanuc paint robots use the Hadi Akeel wrist (named after the VP of Engineering at Fanuc who designed and patented it) which has 3 concentric torque tubes driving the ring gear which provided motion. This allowed some symmetry considerations to be exploited to make the solver faster. It was not a completely generic solver so it would not work for many other kinematic found in the paint robot world.

I read Dinesh Manocha’s PhD thesis (Cal Berkely) looking for a general solver. He used the multipolynomial resultant technique to provide solutions for generalized six degree of freedom robots, and as most industrial robots are 6 degree of freedom devices this might have wide applicability. At the time this technique was not suitable for real time devices because the convergence would not meet the 100 nanosecond requirement of my real time system (30 seconds on the IBM 370). His technique was a special case of the more general technique of solving systems of polynomial equations using homotopy and analytic continuation. Dr. Wampler’s Homotopy method is the most rigorous algorithm available. The solution set will also provide all available manifolds for a given data set.

Dr. Charles Wampler (GMR, Notre Dame) has published his work in homotopy and analytic continuation for kinematics.

I am currently developing the “generic” 6 DOF solver using the GNU Scientific Library and Dr. Wampler’s homotopy method. If it is fast enough on cheap hardware (2Ghz $300 PC) I will port it to the Microsoft Robotics Studio. Dr. Wampler’s book is an excellent introduction to the kinematics of novel devices like those seen on the cover above.

The best book I have read on industrial robotics is the “Bible” by Dr. Richard (Lou) Paul.

The LARPS robot was largely built by turning to page 1 chapter 1 and getting started. This book is now out of print but you can find used copies at Amazon. If you work your way through this book you will learn all that is needed to build a robot and control system, you will also fix more than a few typos/math errors but that is half the fun! A more popular version of this is John Craig’s book. John, Ric, and Paul (Silma) consulted on the LARPS project assisting with the simulation environment and optical TCP algorithm.

There are many other books on robot engineering (many imitators) but for an excellent survey these are the best.

Dr. Paul was issued a patent for an algorithm in path planning in 1997. We had already implemented this algorithm in the LARPS system, sorry dude. We used it for approach/departure control and to find hidden singularities on linear trajectories for the full and redundant 9 DOF system.

 
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.