"Thomas A. Easton - Robots - Rams from Cams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

ROBOTS
rams from cams

The "power suit" that allows a frail human being to lift tons of dead weight and leap
moderate-sized buildings in a single bound has been a science-fiction dream for years . . . until
now!

THOMAS EASTON

“... here is how it works . . . a mass of pressure receptors . . . You push . . . the suit feels it, amplifies
it, pushes with you to take the pres-sure off the receptors that gave the order to push.
"The suit has feedback which causes it to match any motion you make, exactly—but with great force.
"Controlled force . . . force con-trolled without your having to think about it. You jump, that heavy
suit jumps, but higher than you can jump in your skin.
"... that is the beauty of a pow-ered suit: you don't have to think about it. You don't have to drive it,
fly it, conn it, operate it; you just wear it and it takes orders directly from your muscles and does for you
what your muscles are trying to do."*
Sound familiar? It should. Especially to readers of science fiction. It's Heinlein's forecast—often
fol-lowed by other writers—of a self-pro-pelled, feedback-controlled, armored suit, such a thing as an
infantryman needs when the exigencies of war require him to carry more than his back can hold and
perform maneuvers his muscles cannot.
By the time of Heinlein's story, however, wars may not be fought by men in the field, with or without
powered combat suits that follow their wearers' movements as closely as a suit of clothes.



Figure 1. Handyman—a two-armed master-slave manipulator used for handling radioactive
equipment and materials. This photograph shows the operator in close proximity to the slave,
which is whirling the hula-hoop. In actual operating conditions, a con-crete barrier separates the
master sta-tion and the slave, their only con-nection being an electrical control.



Even today the engineers are working on devices similar in principle to that suit, and their progress is
such that by 1980 a man may well be able to step into such a machine. Furthermore, these same devices,
together with certain developments in theoretical biology and information sciences, may be the
forerunners of the first true robots, machines able to move about on legs with no more than occasional
super-visory instructions from remote con-trollers. They may not have intelligence, but they will be
autonomous in away that no machine has ever been, for reflexes such as those found in cats and dogs
may provide appropriate responses to many of the circumstances that may confront or befall them.
This article is intended to outline and motivate one possible path for the development of robots. The
path is not inevitable, nor is it unique, but it seems to me a very likely possi-bility and—on the principle
that the engineers could do worse than to imitate Mother Nature—very possi-bly the easiest way to build
the first robots. More details on some of the information used here, and good dis-cussions of some of the
problems in-volved in designing intelligent and locomotor machines, may be found in M. L. Silbar's
article, "In Quest of a Humanlike Robot" (Analog, No-vember 1971), and in L. L. Sutro and W. L.
Kilmer's article, "MR Robot" (Analog, May 1970). But hopefully, the data and arguments presented here
will provide a general under-standing of the possibilities.
Heinlein's suit is science fiction—but not quite. Modern technology hasn't yet produced anything quite
like it, but it is coming close. Wal-dos—clumsy things with little or no real feedback—have been with us