David Alan Bourne

Introduction The development of advanced robotics brought expectations of increased productivity and quality control, but to everyone's disappointment, these expectations still have not been realized. Advanced stand-alone machines have not greatly improved productivity, and integrating large systems has been prohibitively expensive. What is worse, the few integration projects that have been undertaken took inordinate amounts of engineering time. Several projects took more than 50 man-years to complete, and engineers spent most of this time trying to put round plugs into square sockets. Some machines were not designed to allow for any communication, and while others provided only partial communications that presume a person is operating the front panel. The few machines that were designed to be integrated into a system were rarely compatible, even within a single vendor. At least one dream for factory automation should be simple: Roll a computer onto a factory floor; plug it into a set ...