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www.us- tech.com


Tech-Op-ed December, 2017


SOUNDING OFF By Walter Salm


Editor Emeritus


Leave the Driving to Us M


leaned back and opened a tattered copy of War and Peace and began reading. The car would not need his attention for at least an hour. I read something similar to this in a science fiction story about 65 years


ark drove his car to the freeway entrance, noted the sign that said “Automatic,” pressed an “engage” button and the car locked onto the buried magnetic cable that ran down the center of the right lane. He


ago. SF writers of that era were anticipating the self-driving automobile, but their technology forecast got it all wrong. They envisioned a costly infrastruc- ture requirement for such automation: a ferrous cable buried under the “au- tomatic” highway, much the same as pathways mapped out today on factory floors to guide simplistic rolling robotic wagons. The buried cables never came to pass. Chalk that up to computer tech-


nology and incredible microprocessors, something that was definitely not fore- seen by even the most knowledgeable sci-fi writers of 1952. Today, au- tonomous highway vehicles are about 75 percent perfected. The hard part is getting them approved for licensing on today’s streets and highways. There is still a difficult gray area of autonomous automobile programming that re- quires some very special artificial intelligence (AI) to anticipate and correct for the often unpredictable driving habits of human drivers. Back in the day (late 1950s), most of us in the industry were well steeped


in how electrons behaved and moved through vacuum tubes; the theory had been laid out and explained by Major Armstrong. Transistors were something else, difficult to comprehend, and in the process of trying to grasp their theo- ry of operation, one of my fellow editors at Gernsback Publishing postulated an absolutely insane theory: “Transistors don’t really work. That neat little package contains a glob of putty with three wires coming out. Transistor op- eration depends entirely on mass hallucination.” That being said, that “mass hallucination” today embraces extraordinarily powerful microprocessors con- taining millions of transistors on a single chip. Hallucination or not, in spite of the rapid advances being made in au-


tonomous highway vehicles, there’s still a lot of work to do in teaching the ve- hicle’s resident AI how to drive. A lot of people seem to be overanxious to get these vehicles on the road, possibly too soon. A driverless “bus” (only eight passengers, really a minivan) in Las Vegas recently smacked into an 18- wheeler engaged in the big rigs’ favorite past-time — making multiple passes to get backed properly into a loading dock. Damage was minimal (mostly to the “bus”) and no one was injured, but it proves once again, that there is a learning curve. No matter how smart the AI is, that learning curve includes anticipating what unpredictable humans will do. Factoid: distracted driving today accounts for a scary number of acci-


dents. I personally witnessed one such mishap not long ago, here in Chico, while stopped in the left lane for a red traffic light. The car in the right lane just continued on by blissfully and unconsciously running the red light. The car was t-boned by a car coming off the freeway exit. Was the driver texting or otherwise distracted? Overtired drivers falling asleep at the wheel repre- sent another distracted category that is gaining more and more attention to- day. And, our cars contain many new distractions, including trying to manip- ulate unnecessarily complicated infotainment systems. Then there’s the distracted pedestrian who blindly walks through traffic


while engrossed in texting or gaming on a cellphone. I see it every day, and I see it in TV commercials for new cars extolling automatic braking systems, a part of this burgeoning new automotive technology. I am personally delighted by the autonomous automobile revolution, but


I would still hesitate to ride in such a car given the current state of AI tech- nology. One of the drawbacks is the developing V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) comm system, which requires fully-interlinked and cooperating AI in every vehicle on the road. For this to work, we still need an unknown number of years of im- plementation and fine-tuning. I recall an old advertising slogan, “Go Greyhound and leave the driving


to us,” which certainly appealed to the part of me that didn’t want to drive long distances. I did go Greyhound, several times when I was much younger, but never again. In spite of a terribly inconvenient schedule in Northern Cal- ifornia, I still vastly prefer Amtrak. Or in some cases Southwest Airlines from Sacramento, 95 miles away by airport shuttle. Locals are talking about re-in- stituting scheduled commercial flights into and out of Chico Municipal Air- port, after being flightless for three years when United Express cancelled its service between CIC and SFO. It can’t happen too soon for me. r


PUBLISHER’S NOTE


By Jacob Fattal Publisher


productronica 2017: Data the Key to Industry 4.0


turing industry, and this year’s event surpassed expectations. Increased levels of automation in everything from materials handling to


I


manufacturing was first and foremost at the show. Almost every company was displaying some sort of robotic integration, whether it was an autonomous arm loading PCBs into production machines or a mobile unit wheeling parts across the show floor. This year we’ve seen a significant leap in cobot (collab- orative robot) technology, which allows robots to perform various tasks around the factory without being surrounded by large protective barriers. In addition to the latest-generation capital equipment, including print-


ers, component placement systems, ovens, and inspection machines, there was a great deal of emphasis placed on M2M (machine-to-machine) communi- cations. This year saw the launch of the vendor-independent, non-proprietary Hermes standard, an initiative which by the time productronica arrived, had grown to include 28 suppliers. Hermes is an open protocol, based on TCP/IP and XML, that passes PCB-


flow-related data from machine to machine, backward and forward along the line. At this stage, it will not interfere with any factory-wide control software and can be integrated easily. Version 1.0 was finalized in April of this year and is available now. Originally developed by ASM and Asys, partners include Ersa, MIRTEC,


Saki, KIC, Koh Young, Rehm, and many other leading brands. The new stan- dard is non-proprietary and amendments are made by members democratical- ly, with each company having one vote. The organization is open to new mem- bers, and more information can be found at www.the-hermes-standard.info. Leveraging data is the key to the future of manufacturing. On the shop


floor, all data related to materials and processes can be stored and analyzed, tightening tolerances across the board. A factory can only become “smart” through greater autonomy, which re-


quires huge amounts of information to be gathered, sorted and acted upon. As production grows more autonomous, we must pass the burden of low-level pat- tern recognition and experiential learn- ing to machines. This frees us humans to focus on higher-level executive tasks. Information is the fuel for the engines of Industry 4.0. r


n November, 44,000 visitors from around the world descended on the Messe München for productronica 2017. Our U.S. Tech staff was there in full force. The trade show is a biannual pillar of the electronics manufac-


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