This is a teach pendant, and traditionally,
it’s how you teach a robot arm to do something.
It’s awkward.
Two of the problems with programming robots the traditional way
are that you need to tell it exactly what you want it to do,
point to point.
The other is that the robot assumes that nothing changes.
You just manually drive the tip of the robot
to where you know you need it to go
and then hit ‘record,’ and remember that point,
then you drive it over to the other place and hit ‘record,’
and remember that point, and then, when you play,
it goes from one point to the next.
And it can do that over, and over, and over again.
In the event that there is some error or something moves,
the robot has no way of knowing that.
The robot will still go exactly where you told it to go the first time,
and that can result in a crash, or breaking something,
or injuring a person. It’s just like any computer.
It will do exactly what you ask it to do,
even if that's not what you meant!
In the early days of computers,
writing code generally meant using what’s called 'assembly language'.
You would have to literally tell the processor
to move things from one memory address to another,
or to tweak some values,
or to change specific pixels on the screen.
Like giving instructions to this arm,
you would be telling the chip every single thing that it had to do.
As time moved on, programmers got higher level languages.
Write some words and some brackets,
the system works out the boring details for you.
If you’ve ever worked with a spreadsheet, then that counts.
Writing a formula in Excel, that's enough.
In the end, sure, it all gets converted to assembly language.
For most programmers, they never even have to think about it.
The team here at Autodesk's Pier 9 in San Francisco are
working on more or less the same thing,
just for making physical things.
Basically, the biggest robot that we have in the lab,
which we call ‘Ash,’ is essentially a big,
robotic 3D printer that's printing in stainless steel.
We have a MIG welder that is depositing stainless steel onto a metal plate.
By activating the MIG welder while moving the robot, we’re building a weld bead,
and then we’re building beads on top of each other.
You would typically use welding to stitch two pieces of metal together.
What we’re doing is using the same technology,
but stacking the metal on top
in order to produce a separate piece of finished material.
Now, ultimately, the result is the same.
The motors in the robot arm are told, “move this way.”
It’s just that human’s original instructions are a bit more abstract,
and they're filtered through another couple of layers.
Using a teach pendant would be pretty impractical for these complex curves.
Normal 3D printers do basically 2½D.
They go to an X and a Y, and then up and down.
This robot can point in various directions.
The robot needs to know not only where it is,
but how it should point when it gets there.
We give it a piece of geometry,
and the software figures out the instructions set for the robot
that will result in a print, that is what we want.
One of the things we’re developing is a closed loop feedback system,
where the robot is actually aware of what it’s doing.
Before it completely fails a print,
it’s keeping track of the quality of the print that it’s doing.
It will actually correct, reprogram itself in real time,
in order to avoid an actual failure.
What we’re working on is a vision system,
where between vision and a couple of other sensors,
we can monitor and supervise the status of the prints.
If the welder runs out of wire, or if something else happens,
the robot would traditionally have no way of knowing.
Now, the robot can know that.
Not all the robot’s movements are being directly controlled by a person.
If it goes wrong, it’s a bit different
than just having an error message pop up.
This arm here weighs two tonnes,
and when it wants to, it moves fast.
The only reason I'm allowed this close is because
I'm literally holding the emergency stop button in my hand,
just in case.
Our robot currently has no way of sensing us. What currently happens is
when a person that shouldn’t be near a robot gets close to the robot,
you shut everything down.
It would be great, and we’re interested in a future
where the robot can know that person is there,
with vision or some other kinds of sensing,
and then actively avoid that person,
and continue doing what it’s doing.
Self driving cars, hospital heart monitors,
basically everything electronic: ultimately,
the code in it is just 1s and 0s.
The more levels of abstraction between the programmer and the bare metal,
the easier it is to write code,
but when something goes wrong,
fixing it might be out of your hands.
Thank you very much to all the team at Autodesk,
and to their applied research lab,
here at Pier 9 in San Francisco.
Go and check out their YouTube channel,
or pull down the description for some links to see the amazing projects they're working on.