Volcano monitoring is a task that the Three Ds say definitely should be automated. Source: NASA
I've had occasion to write articles about factory automation several times, and one question that often comes up is: "Why automate a manual process?" In the short run, automation is expensive. It's a lot cheaper to keep running the same old manual system (especially if it's working well) than to take on the capital expense of replacing it with automation.
Any automated system replacing a manual one will be, by definition, novel. There is large technical risk in any novel system. Experienced engineers know that nobody is smart enough get it right the first time (at least not with any consistency). There are always things you don't know, forgot, or did just a little bit wrong - not to mention the dreaded unintended consequences that plague any complex system.
These days, it's possible to automate virtually any task. The challenge in the industrial engineering field is to interlink islands of automation into what my friends at Siemens like to call "Totally Integrated Automation" (TIA).
There are, however, still a few tasks that are manual in nature. Folding them in under the TIA umbrella, whether using technology from Siemens or another factory automation equipment vendor, as manual systems is problematic. There is a tendency to automate any task as a knee-jerk reaction to manualism.
That can be a mistake. Not everything should be automated, even in a TIA environment. Some things people are better at doing than machines. There aren't many, and the number grows fewer as automated systems become ever more capable. But, they are still there, and represent big land mines for system integrators.
The issue will also start to impact consumers in the general public as embedded control systems spread throughout society. In fact, it's already becoming significant in the automotive space, as systems become commercialized to monitor (and correct) driver actions that the computers deem suspect. Poor shifting habits were the first to succumb to the engineers' heavy hands with automatic transmissions. Then, decades later, overbraking by panicked drivers was theoretically eliminated by anti-lock brake systems (ABS). Now, we're poised for a host of computer intrusions into the driving process, from falling asleep at the wheel to clumsy parking techniques.
There are a number of criteria that can be used to decide when to automate a task, but the earliest, and still the most universally applicable, is the Three Ds. The Three Ds hail from the early days of robotics, when doing anything automatically was a major challenge. It's a razor that can be used to divide sharply between what is essentially for humans to do, and what is fair game for automation.
(A razor is a logical device used to guide difficult this versus that decisions. The famous Occam's Razor, which tells you to always favor the simplest hypothesis that explains the facts, is a well known example. Razors should be short, easy to understand and apply, and unambiguous. It also helps if the actually work!)
The Three Ds are "dirty, dull, and dangerous." The razor says that any task that exhibits even one of these characteristics should be considered for automation. If it exhibits any two, its a strong candidate for automation with all deliberate speed. If it exhibits all three, get the humans out of there as fast as their little legs can carry them.
Recently, NASA deployed some robotic sensing devices atop Mt. St. Helens that demonstrate how to apply the Three Ds. The task is to carefully monitor a number of significant variables at hot spots on the volcano.
Dirty does not just mean a tendency to get coated with unspecified unpleasant guck. I once had a summer job cleaning the hard-water scale from the insides of boiler tubes. It came out as nano-scale red powder particles suspended in the air. That was a traditionally dirty job. It was also dirty in a wider Three Ds sense: ambient conditions were such as to physically stress human organisms. Basically, the insides of boilers were uncomfortably hot. Not quite hyperthermia-inducing hot, but hot enough that you didn't want to be in there any longer than you had to be. While being outdoors on the top of a high mountain might seem an ideal environment to a city dweller locked in an office, to those of us who've been left out in the elements long enough to feel the effects of exposure, it qualifies as mildly dirty. Add in noxious vapors and other things that tend to leak out of volcanic hot spots, and it gets dirty, indeed.
Dull really means tedious. Anything repetitive, especially if the situation requires constant attention, is dull. Again, data logging is something that sounds like a walk in the park to those who haven't done it manually. I remember one day as an undergraduate student, when I was studying the stability of an oscillator I'd just finished building. I set the thing up with a frequency counter displaying measurements to six digit accuracy on a nixie-tube display. This was before the days of LED readouts, and long before PC-based data acquisition. Only the last two digits were changing. I sat in a (happily reasonably comfortable) chair writing down the last three digits every 30 seconds for six hours straight. No bathroom breaks. No talking with the guy at the next bench. No reading a book. That taught me the real meaning of dull. The poor robots on Mt. St. Helens are tasked with doing that job 24/7 with the only reprieve coming when the mountain next blows its top and ends their miserable existences.
Dangerous means who or what is undertaking the task is in imminent danger of annihilation, or at least grievous bodily harm. NASA's robots weren't put in nice, safe locations. They were put in places the volcanologists deemed most likely to vaporize catastrophically, taking the robots' spindly little bodies with them.
Folks - and you're going to see a lot of them in the next year or so as the economic recovery seems endlessly "jobless" - who complain that automation is taking away their jobs should heed the Three Ds. The only people that automation (properly done) will put out of work are those who are so stupid they embrace tedium, so expendable they get sent into the lion's maw, or so desperate that they're willing to work under inhuman conditions. The rest of us will make do with the good jobs.
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