18 Mar
1998
18 Mar
'98
8:57 p.m.
On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, Tony Duell wrote:
I have here a book from the Philips Technical Library
called 'Practical
Robot Circuits' published in 1960. The first half of this book contains
the design for a robot 'dog' using essentially an analogue control system
(mostly amplifiers and comparators) to process the signals from various
sensors (photocells, microphones, thermistors, etc). The outputs of the
comparators feed an array of relays which control assorted motors (this
is, of course, a digital section).
Now you're talking classic analog computing! Somewhere I've got a book of
Ivan Sutherland's on this subject. I searched the net and found that he
wrote "An Electro-Mechanical Model of Simple Animals" in 1958, but that's
not the one I have. It's all coming back now (even though this was just
before I was born) -- the age of cybernetics! Whatever happened to the
age of the personal robot, and why do we still have manual vacuum
cleaners?
-- Doug