Lab Dedicated to Creating Robots Opens
In the not-so-distant future, intelligent machines may make the surface of Mars habitable for living organisms and tiny robots may enter human bloodstreams to cure disease.
In the process, Sandia National Laboratories’ new $33-million Robotic Manufacturing Science and Engineering Laboratory hopes to make real what once was science fiction.
The new facility will house Sandia’s Intelligent Systems and Robotics Center, which is already working to create robots for manufacturing, materials handling, cleanup of contaminated areas and battlefield uses.
But center director Pat Eicker said the lab is also gaining ground in the area of microrobotics, which will probably be used to build micromachines.
“Intelligent machines will terraform Mars; that is, they will be used in altering the planet’s surface to support life,” Eicker said. “They will make able the disabled, they will safeguard the peace, they will swim in the veins of our children’s children performing molecular analysis and surgery as needed.”
During a tour of the facility, Thomas Weber, a senior member of the technical staff, demonstrated a one-inch square robot--a precursor to the future microrobots mentioned by Eicker--called MARV, for Miniature Autonomous Robotic Vehicle.
The MARV propelled itself on tiny wheels across a sheet of plastic, tracing the path of a red wire taped under the plastic. The wire emitted a radio frequency that MARV could detect and follow.
Weber said researchers were working to create robots smaller than MARV to be used for such military purposes as reconnaissance, target verification and bomb-damage assessment.
Dan Schmitt, another member of Sandia’s technical staff, demonstrated a standoff sensor attached to a robotic arm. The sensor allows the arm to maintain a constant distance between it and the object on which it is working.
Schmitt said the sensor can be used on robots that paint, cut or dismantle nuclear weapons.
The center was dedicated Oct. 28 by U.S. Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), who pushed a button that set in motion a virtual-reality robot on a video screen. The robot snipped the computerized ribbon image that extended across a picture of the 73,000-square-foot facility at Kirtland Air Force Base.
“This is the realization of a dream of about 15 years,” Sandia president C. Paul Robinson said.
Inside the two-story facility are 36 individual laboratories, conference rooms, an auditorium and an outdoor test track for robots.
Robinson said the state-of-the-art center is a sharp contrast to the Quonset huts and tin sheds where Sandia’s robotics researchers used to work.
“We now have a place where you don’t need an umbrella over your head,” said Phil Monnin, president of Motoman Inc., one of the largest robot manufacturers in the country. Monnin said he has worked with Sandia for about five years.
Although the facility’s key customer will be the U.S. Department of Energy, with an emphasis on national security, Monnin said the facility stands as a symbol of the changing focus of the Energy Department from wartime to peacetime.
