Page 26 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

6 Modern Robotics

In 1933, Wiener met Arturo Rosenblueth, a Mexican neuro-
physiologist who had started a wide-ranging informal seminar that
brought together biological and physical sciences. Wiener was drawn
to it not only from his lifelong interest in natural history but also
by the challenge to apply mathematical ideas and communications
theory to biology, a field that had seen little mathematical analysis.
Wiener began to think about the similarities between electronic cir-
cuits and the nervous systems of animals.
Meanwhile, Wiener had also worked with Vannevar Bush,
another versatile mathematician and systems thinker who had
developed a complex analog computer that could solve equations
with many variables. (An analog computer uses physical forces
such as electricity to model and solve equations.) In beginning to
think about the structure of computing machines, Wiener joined
other researchers who would soon be launching a revolution in
information processing.

Stopping the Bombers

In 1939, Europe again plunged into war. Weiner, who had not
learned much about his Jewish ancestry until later in life, worked
hard to help German Jewish scientists who had become refugees in
America. As it became clearer that the United States would enter
World War II, Wiener also returned to the problem of ballistics, or
the analysis of trajectories of flying objects.
Bomber planes could now fly much higher and faster than the
early machines of the previous war. This in turn meant that track-
ing planes and aiming antiaircraft guns by hand would no longer be
sufficient. This was particularly true because bomber pilots would
be maneuvering to throw off the gunners’ aim. Nevertheless, Wiener
was able to apply the statistical analysis that had enabled him to
work with the random Brownian motion of molecules to dealing
with the gun-aiming problem. He realized that while the evasive
maneuvers might be somewhat random, they were limited by the
physical characteristics of both plane and pilot. For example, a plane
can only turn or dive so fast without having its wings come off or
the pilot “black out.” Applying appropriate “statistical constraints,”