Machine Intelligence - The Bottle Neck of Large Scale Automation
22 December 1986
The crucial bottle neck of today's computer integrated manufacturing technology is the "MISSING LINK" - the missing link between large scale integrated automation and individual DNC machines and robots. This missing link is the machine intelligence (MI) for individual manufacturing processes. MI is a system to render each individual manufacturing machine the ability to sense, to learn, to think, to judge, to communicate and to act. It is computer intensive, it is sensor intensive, but it must be process based. The generic components in the MI system for manufacturing would include: (a) full-scale instrumentation for process monitoring; (b) on-line tool wear/breakage detection; (c) on-line machine failure diagnosis; (d) adaptive control for the manufacturing process; (e) online work piece quality control; and (f) self-learning optimization.