The robot had a 'teach mode'. You used a hand controller to move the robot to a position, pressed a 'teach' button, and then moved to a new position. The values

The robot had a 'teach mode'. You used a hand controller to move the robot to a position, pressed a 'teach' button, and then moved to a new position. The values from the 6 position encoders were written to the next memory location when the teach button was pressed. To run the robot you just step the memory and move to the recorded position. Ford had a long (multi-mile) production line. It took weeks to set up a new line, part of which was taken up by robot programming. You had to move the product line a few millimeters, teach a new robot position, and repeat. Our research problem was to teach the robot standing still and then, given information from an encoder on the production line, compute the path that the robot should take to hit the moving position. That would reduce the robot programming time to a few minutes. Really a simple problem. A 7-degree of freedom, non-collision robot path in real time based on static data, programmed on a micro with 8 kilobytes of memory, including space for initial data. Bill Perzley was the 'head of research', on loan from Condec Corp. He was a genius and a super-intense cigar smoker (the harder he thought, the more smoke was generated). He worked out the exact memory data BY HAND to make sure I got the right answers by program. Bill and I flew out to SRI International to learn how to compute robot joint positions from (Richard) Lou Paul. On the flight back to Connecticut we sat in the back of the plane near the restroom studying our notes. Bill was puffing on his cigars. By the end of the flight you couldn't see all the way up the cabin. Those were the days.