Put to the Test : Rockwell Science Center Finds Itself in Position Where It Must Earn Its Keep

Beyond the small stone nameplate at the curb, up the steep, winding driveway and past the swaying palm trees, 375 scientists and staff members plug away from morning to night at the Rockwell Science Center.

For the past 30 years, Rockwell’s scientists and engineers have commanded some of the most scenic high ground in Thousand Oaks--a 79-acre high tech retreat overlooking Wildwood Park off Camino Dos Rios.

And still, it seems, almost nobody knows they are there.

They labor from 8 to 5 on the high-technology projects that aerospace giant Rockwell International Corp. hopes will propel its business into the 21st Century and beyond.

And, because of the economic difficulties of the aerospace industry, they have stepped up the tempo in recent years as financial pressures have increased the need for them to justify their existence.

It was once enough simply that the center existed, current and former employees say. It was a think tank that added to the company’s status.

Some of the country’s brightest young minds were lured to Thousand Oaks with promises of starting salaries well above what academia could pay and offers of generous funding for basic scientific research projects.

But times have changed, not just at Rockwell, but for most of the major American companies that sponsor corporate research labs. With money tight and competition from abroad keener than ever, top corporation officials increasingly are asking research labs to earn their keep.

Now, the scientists and managers at the Rockwell Science Center must persuade their firm that they are worth the $60 million the company spends each year to keep the elite center running.

That amount is only a smidgen of the corporation’s $483 million operating income. But in lean times, every smidgen counts.

The tight economy landed Dennis Anderson in a cluttered, rectangular lab, trying to make Army circuit boards for less.

This was a non-priority project just five years ago, when the military pre-negotiated profits for suppliers such as Rockwell’s Collins Avionics and Communications division in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“In the good old days,” no one worried much about cutting costs, said Jim Wooldridge, the manager of Collins’ advanced operations engineering.

Then the nation’s priorities changed and the Pentagon’s budget shriveled.

Today, the Army is looking for deals. In an effort to trim future expenses, it is partially funding the Collins Avionics circuit board project, which could drastically reduce the expense of manufacturing the circuit boards that control the movement and direction of vessels such as the space shuttle, airplanes, and ships.

“You see, the rule from on top was--get involved in projects that affect the divisions,” Anderson said.

Such a directive was once rare at the Science Center, where scientists mostly wanted to “publish papers and become famous,” according to Allen Firstenberg, a former center scientist who left this year to start his own computer software business.

Now, Firstenberg added, the company wants the Science Center “to make money.”

Firstenberg said his departure from Rockwell has little to do with the center’s changing priorities. Rockwell executives, however, admit that some top-notch scientists fled to universities or other pursuits as the center steadily geared itself more toward commercial goals.

At this point, executives say, there is little if no room for research that bears no immediate relation to a specific corporate need.

“If it has some strong scientific capability, we will work it for a couple of years, but it will, eventually, be contingent upon meeting a need at Rockwell,” said Andrew Pettifor, the center’s director of research and planning.

Center executives concede that while some of science’s greatest discoveries developed from years of seemingly fruitless research, this is a luxury the Rockwell of the 1990s can ill afford to sponsor.

Just a decade ago, the future of aerospace firms looked bright and unlimited. And the Science Center grew every year between 1980 and 1990, approximately doubling in size in 10 years.

Nearly all the work was related to defense.

“Fourteen years ago, when I started at the Science Center,” said former center scientist Peter Asbeck, “it was relatively easy to obtain funding from the government--albeit in relatively small amounts--for a wide range of research efforts. And that led to more quasi-independent research efforts” all coexisting under the same roof.

Back then, Rockwell was known primarily for military aircraft, space shuttles and guidance systems for nuclear missiles. Staffing at the Science Center reached a high of 435 employees. If research there duplicated studies under way at universities or other private laboratories, few noticed or cared.

Since 1988, however, the company’s focus has shifted from defense-related work to commercial contracts. Rockwell once drew 70% of its funding from defense work, and only 30% from its commercial ventures like factory automation equipment, auto parts and newspaper printing presses. Today, after much corporate effort to adjust to the new economic reality, those numbers are reversed.

And still, the company struggles. In fiscal 1992, Rockwell’s operating profit dropped 20%. The Science Center began laying off employees, dropping 12% of its work force in the last three years.

“Now, things are coordinated much more tightly,” said Asbeck, for the last two years a professor of electrical engineering at UC San Diego. “It’s harder for individuals to get money on their own” because Defense Department research budgets have shrunk considerably and competition for the few remaining grants is fierce.

Nevertheless, the center remains heavily dependent on government contracts, such as the Army funding awarded to the Collins’ circuit board project. A majority of center research money comes directly from government coffers, Rockwell executives said, with another large chunk coming from corporate funding which is partly reimbursed by the government.

As Rockwell executives have learned, though, there are few guarantees that even this reduced flow of federal dollars will stay constant. The center’s scientists must find other ways to stay busy.

That’s why Stephen Chiu, down the hall from Anderson, is trying to teach computers how to think.

The process is called “fuzzy logic” and involves programming computers to distinguish not merely between “yes” and “no,” but also between various gradations of “maybe.”

Chiu explains it this way. Say someone wants to find out if they are far from the nearest supermarket. Computers of the present could only give strictly definitive answers, such as if the individual is more than 20 miles away, she is “far”; less, and she is “not far.”

But a computer using fuzzy logic could reply that the potential shopper is far or close to a certain degree, allowing for a much wider range of variation.

Recently, Chiu visited one of the corporation’s steam-generating plants to help the factory’s managers determine exactly how much fuel they needed to run the plant.

By using fuzzy logic programming, Chiu got the computers to weigh all the different variables that determine fuel use, such as the degree of pressure and temperature fluctuations.

What might have taken a slew of managers hours of monitoring and comparing notes is now boiled down to one quick question to the computer: Based on all these conditions around the plant, how strongly does it feel that fuel needs to be added?

“Steve’s gone to some of our operating companies, and activities that would have taken them weeks, he’s done in two days,” said Joe Longo, a corporate vice president of research and vice president and general manager of the Science Center.

Fuzzy logic is a project that gets Rockwell executives excited and puffed up with pride; when the Science Center holds its annual open house, however, the fuzzy logic display doesn’t draw nearly the looky-loos that the virtual reality demonstration does.

Virtual reality is scientist Peter Tinker’s baby, his professional obsession for the last 2 1/2 years. Once people try it, they understand why.

Mainly, it’s an elongated, gray helmet and a $100,000 computer system. A visitor puts the helmet on so it covers his eyes, Tinker pushes some computer buttons, and the interior of the helmet lights up.

In the current demonstration, visitors are in the middle of a mock-up of an air-traffic control room. If they turn their head to the right or left, their view on the screen moves with them, so they are now looking at a part of the room they could not see before.

If they push a button on the computer mouse in their hand, they can move forward or backward in any direction, defy gravity and travel up to the ceiling, or zoom down to the floor to inspect the rolling balls at the feet of the traffic controller’s chair. All this without taking a step.

Tinker did not develop the system himself. The separate parts are all commercially available and companies besides Rockwell have invested in the high-priced technology. Some, like Nintendo and Sega, hope to one day build a system cheap and versatile enough that it will sell in stores as a hi-tech video game.

Rockwell, though, is not in the entertainment business, and Tinker has other plans. In his wildest dreams, he pictures two engineers, one on either coast of the U.S., each with a helmet on, standing in the same video “room.”

“You’ll have this designer standing in his office and he’ll be pointing at something, and he’ll say, ‘Hey, Jim, do you see what I’m pointing at here?’ and Jim--3,000 miles away--saying, ‘Yeah, I see you.’ ”

The two designers will “walk” about the electronic traffic control room together, making sure that the manager has a good view of his subordinates from the side office, checking out the number of chairs that can comfortably fit along the control panel.

“This is the only way I know of to get some results without actually building something,” Tinker said. “Once you’ve built it, there’s this built-in reluctance to go back and change things.”

Tinker said he sees the company using virtual reality to test out new airplanes, the layout of factories, and any other projects that need their kinks worked out while still on the designing table.

Rockwell’s research reorganization came more gradually than at many major U.S. corporations, where radical, overnight cutbacks in research and development has left scientists bewildered and frustrated with their corporate management.

AT&T;, Du Pont and General Electric’s Schenectady Labs are but a few of the corporate research laboratories now being downsized and reorganized, with many scientists being sent to the divisional labs to work more closely with existing product lines.

“That may not be getting the maximum value from the core competency of researchers,” said John Seely Brown, corporate vice president and director of Xerox Corp.’s innovative Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). “Researchers are not good product developers--they are good at getting to the root of problems.”

Brown is known in research circles for his controversial insistence that the purpose of corporate laboratories is not merely to invent new products and technologies, but to fundamentally transform the way the corporation functions.

The Science Center is a far cry from the newfangled PARC, where anthropologists and sociologists labor alongside seasoned scientists, creating products that Xerox hopes will chart new courses by radically breaking step with current work patterns.

Yet Rockwell has kept many of its scientists happy by a determination to maintain the status of the elite center and not ship employees off to the less prestigious divisional labs. Some center scientists--like former employee Asbeck--say it is now a better place than ever to work.

“Actually, I think it’s more fun now,” Asbeck said. “The payoff of the research is more readily identifiable. You can see what (your work) is doing to help the company and help the world.”