Page 171 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

CYBORG ODYSSEY 151

was available at the University of Reading, England, Warwick was
excited. By the 1980s, cybernetics, the science of communication and
control pioneered by Norbert Wiener, was not commonly pursued as
a single unified subject. Rather, research in computer systems and
robotics was likely to be parceled out among computer science and
various disciplines of electronic and mechanical engineering. But
for Warwick, cybernetics evoked the very connections he was most
interested in: systems, control, communication, computation, and
even biology. In 1988, therefore, Warwick applied for and received
the professorship in cybernetics at Reading that he holds today.

Boosting Productivity

As professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Warwick
has directed or been involved with a variety of bread-and-butter
robotics projects. Some of them drew upon Warwick’s past work in
developing software that can detect and diagnose faults in automated
manufacturing systems. Clearly, such systems are of great practical
interest to manufacturers, since maximum throughput with mini-
mum breakdowns results in the highest possible productivity.
One of Warwick’s approaches was to use a neural network
that can gradually recognize what combinations of factors or
data values make a breakdown more likely. Or approaching the
problem a different way, the network can look for (and reinforce)
those conditions that result in efficient, uninterrupted produc-
tion. Consulting with some manufacturing companies, Warwick’s
software was even able to help them pinpoint differences between
shifts of human workers in terms of how well they supervised the
automatic machinery.

Helping the Disabled

Warwick’s long-term interest in the mechanisms of the human body
and their possible enhancement has naturally extended to the pos-
sibility of creating devices to help disabled people. He and other
researchers at Reading developed, for example, a platform onto
which an ordinary wheelchair can be placed. The platform can then