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.