Like a driver who refuses to ask for directions when lost, today's industrial robots don't know when they're in trouble and should stop and get help—which limits their usefulness in manufacturing.
Now University of Maryland Professor S. K. Gupta and his students have developed RoboSAM (ROBOtic Smart Assistant for Manufacturing), an industrial robot smart enough to know when something is wrong, to pause and to call a human for help.
Currently, industrial robots are used mostly for high-volume, reliably repetitive tasks with unchanging, tightly proscribed parameters, such as automobile assembly lines.
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