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This isn't an area that I study, directly, but I've had some experience with other robotic automation systems on a small/medium scale. Maybe this is common and
by mdip 5y ago
This isn't an area that I study, directly, but I've had some experience with other robotic automation systems on a small/medium scale.
Maybe this is common and my experience is at issue, but I found the grid design with the "workers" on top to be really interesting.
My most direct experience was with a tape robot. This wasn't a run-of-the-mill backup library for a small DC, but a huge room on half of a floor of the datacenter that had a 6 axis[0] "bigger than an average adult man" one-arm robot that is usually seen in an automotive factory. It moved on a track the length of the room, grabbed tapes from a library and inserted it into drives; all of which were attached to a mainframe.
This was done with so few sensors, that the tape robot couldn't tell if it successfully grabbed a tape or missed it; indication of failure wasn't realized until the drive reported no tape present when the operation completed.
When it missed, the tape often ended up in the track where it was, sometimes, destroyed or could cause other forms of major malfunction.
Dealing with products of varying sizes, sensors to detect the successful retrieval of a product seem like they'd be necessary no matter how things are setup, but by designing it with the robots on top, a failed grab, at worst, results in the product remaining somewhere near where it is, or in the wrong bin -- but not stuck in the way of the track.
Coupled with sensors to detect "when the product was 'lost'" or where the product was failed to be retrieved from, the system could attempt to "retry the operation", avoiding operational shut-down/having to rely on the skill of operational staff to identify a failure condition early enough to prevent problems.[1]
[0] I think, not positive
[1] There's a study out there regarding factory automation that appeared shortly after Elon Musk gave up on "fully automated production" that talks about how bad people are at responding to "rare conditions" in an automated factory, resulting in costs that often outweigh the benefits of removing people from the process -- this sort of design appears to try to address some of the major things.
- mdip 5y agoWorth mentioning: I never worked with the mainframe in my previous job but was located in the datacenter. Most of my knowledge came from asking why the suite had 20 or so "big red stop buttons". Apparently someone was hospitalized shortly after it was installed. And like all things, it was replaced a year later by a much more compact device that stored somewhere on the order of 100 times the data about a year after I started.
- lorepieri 5y agoCan you share the references you mention at point 1? Thanks!
- mdip 5y agoI wanted to include a link directly to it on the last post but couldn't find it after a few searches. I had originally read about it in the context of Tesla's automation failures (or, possibly, some of the issues around auto-pilot). It referenced a post-mortem style paper analysing the the failures and where GM failed to realize that factory automation is a "hard problem" back in the 80s. I couldn't find the original paper that I read, but found an article with a myriad of links that explains the situation better (and will likely lead to a lot more) at https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-repeated-car-industry-mistakes-from-the-1980s/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/04/experts-say-tesla-has-r...
- mdip 5y agoThe tape system was really interesting to me during the short time that it was there (upgraded shortly after I started); I didn't expect to be able to find any useful information on it but surprisingly, an old IBM Promo video exists on YouTube. If you're interested in seeing what it looks like, I put it at 1:04, since that's where the 3D rendered exterior view starts. They can be extended and ours was much longer than that one in the video if memory serves (one end to the other of a complete DC floor diagonally; it forced a really odd layout for the original mainframe, cabinets, and then ultimately the tape library that replaced it). Link: https://youtu.be/GwMn7YpF8r8?t=64 https://youtu.be/GwMn7YpF8r8?t=64 Without the playback position: https://youtu.be/GwMn7YpF8r8 https://youtu.be/GwMn7YpF8r8