Freddy assembles a toy from a heap of parts
In 1973 Ambler, Barrow, Brown, Burstall and Popplestone of Edinburgh described an assembly system at IJCAI-73: a moving table, a hand with sensors and two TV cameras, joined through a Honeywell 316 to an ICL 4130 running POP-2. The operator dumps parts in a heap; the machine breaks the heap up, recognises the parts with an overhead camera, lays them out and assembles a peg and rings, a toy car or a toy ship by feel. Showing it half a dozen new parts takes about two hours and programming the assembly about four; the assembly itself takes an hour or two and succeeds about four times out of five.
Why it matters
For the first time a robot went on its own from a disordered heap to an assembled product, and, more to the point, could be taught a new product in a day or two instead of being rebuilt. At the same time this machine stood at the centre of the dispute that produced the Lighthill report: the school’s page says the report provoked a massive loss of confidence in AI just as Freddy II came to work.
The paper describes two separate subprograms: layout (finding parts with a wide-angle side camera, inspecting them with the overhead camera, breaking a heap up by its protrusions, by turning it over or by pushing it) and assembly from standard positions with a simple vice on a workbench; recognition runs on a hierarchical description of parts, views, outlines and holes and a structure-matching algorithm; the system is about 50K of POP-2 code. What the record does not claim: the name Freddy is absent from the paper itself (0 occurrences) and comes from the history page of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, which says that by 1973 the research had produced the FREDDY II robot, capable of assembling objects automatically from a heap of parts; the extended version in the journal Artificial Intelligence of 1975 was not read; the sources do not name the month of the conference. A note on a common retelling: the four hours in the paper are the programming of the assembly operations, not the assembly, which takes an hour or two.