Of all the fields of modern technology, robotics is likely to be one of the most influential in changing the very nature of our society.

In the past, the term "robot" has tended to conjure up pictures of automatonlike machines, often seen as a threat to people themselves. The concept of the robot goes back many decades, but-with the introduction of modern microelectronics - the whole field of robotics has been given a new impetus and exciting prospects. We can achieve almost automatic manufacture of a whole range of goods and products. Moreover, these can be made by robots with consistency of quality, both in mass production and in smaller batches. The manufacturing operations which can be automated are not only those of assembly but also of joining.

This paper will review, firstly, the state and trend of robotics in Japan, and secondly, how to promote a rapid increase of robot population in Japan. Finally, in anticipation of the coming 21st century, human-robot symbiosis is discussed in connection with social implications.

The author stresses the need for relevant empirical data concerning the organizational and human factors resulting from the introduction of robots. After discussing automation in industry and business, as well as military and space applications, the author identifies the problems and consequences arising out of robotization in industry. He concludes with a plea for meshing the robot and social technologies in order to bring about economic and technological revitalization.

To facilitate expedient communication with robots, a very-high level hierarchical robot command language (HIROB) has been designed and implemented. HIROB uses the full and comprehensive syntax of the English imperative, allowing users to control a robot without the need of learning an esoteric programming language. A Parser/Scanner/Recognizer (PSR) performs a lexical analysis of a HIROB command stream, and identifies which portions of the command stream already exist as fully defined procedures in the files of the Procedure Management System (PMS). Those portions which do not exist must be defined using either existing HIROB procedures (English phrases), or by using the primitive commands of the low-level robot command language (LOROB). This process is fully recursive, so that HIROB procedures may consist of defined or undefined HIROB procedures, as well as LOROB commands, with the understanding that a high-level command cannot be executed until all of its hierarchical sub-commands have been fully defined. A user-friendly editor has been incorporated into the PMS to allow convenient creation, modification, and testing of HIROB commands.

Robotic vision is concerned with providing, primarily through image sensory data acquisition and analysis, the basis for planning robotic manipulator actions upon and within a restricted world of solid objects. Ideally, its function should correspond to the human visual system's capacity to guide hand/eye coordination or body/eye navigation tasks. Fundamental to the notion of functionality in a 3D space partially filled with solid objects, is the requirement to appreciate the depth dimension, from a particular viewpoint. Human vision abounds with depth cues derivable from imagery and many of these have been the subjects of study for robotic vision application. However, direct range recovery using time-of-flight methods (ultrasonic or light) has distinct advantages for robotics and it is easy to justify these alternative approaches despite (and maybe even because of) their independence from visual cues.

This paper presents work in progress in the Computer Vision and Robotics Laboratory at The Australian National University towards implementing a robotic hand/eye coordination system with applicability in the scene domain of brightly coloured, simply shaped objects with relatively untextured surfaces in arbitrary 3 dimensional configurations. The advantages of using directly acquired range data (via a laser time-of-flight range scanner) in enhancing the scene segmentation phase of analysis is emphasised and fairly convincing results presented. Actual vision-driven manipulation has not yet been developed but plans towards this end are included.

A curvilinear robot constructed from a number of modular flexible sections of fixed length and diameter but independently controlled radius and direction of curvature has been equipped with an optical fibre image guide transmitting images from between the gripper jaws to the remote TV camera of Microvision-100, a microcomputer controlled real-time DMA-based vision System that is easily trained to recognise the shape, position and orientation of components. The gripper position and orientation is controlled by feedback from the vision System, the action taken depending on component recognition and inspection for defects. Redundant degrees of freedom enable the curvilinear robot to avoid obstacles and work in confined spaces.

We discuss the use of fuzzy set based methodologies as a tool for helping robots develop and implement plans. We are particularly concerned with matching fuzzily described states with fuzzy antecedents in production rules.