 |
| I, Robot Maker |
|
Unfortunately, the robot seemed to have a mind of its own. “Smoke came out everywhere,” Nguyen remembers. “I was so disappointed. I spent the rest of the day looking for the mistake.” He finally determined that one of the machine’s 850 resistors was in the wrong place and he corrected the error. The robot worked perfectly. Now dean of CUA’s engineering school, Nguyen can afford to laugh about that long-ago day. As an award-winning robotics researcher, he has spent his professional life developing machines that can do what human beings can’t (such as cleaning up nuclear waste) or would rather not do (such as cutting the grass). The author of three books and more than 100 technical articles, Nguyen is the founding editor of the international journal Intelligent Automation and Soft Computing. “Charlie is one of the best known and most respected researchers in the field of robotics,” says Kevin Cleary, research professor in the Imaging Science and Information Systems Center at Georgetown University. The CUA dean’s contributions to robotics were honored in 2004 with a lifetime achievement award from the World Automation Congress. Earlier that year President Bush appointed Dean Nguyen to the board of directors of the Vietnam Education Foundation, where he joined senators and members of Bush’s Cabinet in promoting educational exchange between the United States and Nguyen’s native Vietnam. In July 2004 the organization Asia Entertainment also honored the dean with a community service award for his contributions to engineering education. Nguyen still has that first robot he made in 1982. It sits on a shelf close to its much larger and more imposing cousin, a spider on steroids that Nguyen demonstrates by sitting down at a computer keyboard a few feet away and typing in commands. The robot whirrs and contorts itself into the position Nguyen has dictated on the computer. “This robot demonstrates everything you learn in robotics,” Nguyen says. “I can give it a very arbitrary pose and it can move to that position very accurately, within a thousandth of an inch.” The robot is capable of this precise movement because it has six degrees of freedom, a technical capability that results in movements replicating the mechanics of the human body. “You don’t wash dishes with your arm, but you lock your arm and move your hand. This uses the same concept,” he explains. After the robot’s arm is locked, the hand becomes a nimble gadget capable of great sensitivity and superhuman accuracy. “I wanted to prove the concept that a robot will do exactly as it’s told but can also make intelligent decisions,” Nguyen says. For instance, he explains, if you tell a robot to move from one point to another, it will do that. But if something is in the way, the robot must be able to move around the object. That’s where the artificial intelligence comes in. Sensors enable such intelligence by helping a robotic arm recognize the amount of force needed to perform a task. Equipped with such sensors, the arm of Nguyen’s spiderlike robot can move across a sheet of plexiglass mounted on springs of varying stiffness, modulating the amount of pressure it applies to the sheet depending on the strength of the underlying springs. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center was impressed with this robot’s ability to perform high-precision assembly tasks and adapted the robot to help assemble the International Space Station currently orbiting the earth. Dean Nguyen has also worked on medical applications of robotics and he lights up when he talks about a future application: microscopic cellular robots small enough to be injected into the body and dexterous enough to clean out clogged arteries. “Let’s say you need open-heart surgery to unblock blood vessels,” he explains. “Instead of opening you up, the doctor injects tiny robots and controls them from outside your body. That sounds like something from a movie but there’s a lot of research going into it right now.” Nguyen speaks like a visionary, and with good cause. “Everything we talked about 20 years ago is happening now,” he says. “I know. I lived through it.” – A.C. |
Return to the CUA Magazine Contents Page Return to the CUA Public Affairs Home Page Revised: March 2005 All contents copyright © 2005. |
The young robot was misbehaving, and its creator, Charles Nguyen, wasn’t happy. It was 1982, and Nguyen, eager to prove himself as a new assistant professor of electrical engineering, had decided that instead of buying a robot for his experiments, he would build one from a $200 kit. He spent three months on the project and did everything himself — installed every resistor, soldered every connection. Now the grand moment had arrived. Nguyen summoned his CUA department chairman, eager to impress him, and powered up the machine.