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.pdfforecast as an input to the model for the coming up calculations.
IV. Proposed system description.
The usual local co-ordinate systems have the same accuracy and reliability as the WGS-84, so they are transformable to each other within the given precision requirements. However, in some cases there are co-ordinate systems with double projection and those have difficulties through the transformation procedure. The solution can be a general interpolation technique for these areas, hence in both cases the GPS measurements can virtually be taken in the local system working like applying a continuous electrical co-ordinate system.
It is well known that the penetration errors of the electromagnetic waves, so the GPS signals, are highly correlated in positions with similar or same weather conditions. But in totally different circumstances, even 5 degrees, – app. 500 km – apart, like Hungary’s dimensions, there are differences in the penetration conditions, hence in the measurement readings, resulting differences in the RTCM output messages. Also, the main reason of these differences is the troposphere that is why the meteorological conditions and fast changes have to be examined and taken into the account of modeling. There are many advantages and, in fact, necessities to involve these factor in the modeling algorithm to improve on the general accuracy.
The procedure is to examine the RTCM messages from the separate stations and evaluate the differences among them. The correction can be determined to the vertical from the sight line of each satellite. From these corrections it is possible to estimate the meteorological conditions for each station and calculate a similar grid as in the EAGLE system does for the ionosphere for the grid points of the local framework. The grid will be regarded to the troposphere and in this case a very accurate forecast can be delivered.
The EAGLE puts the collected meteorological data into the modeling procedure to calculate, the tropospheric error estimates and calculates ion-free tropo-free correction message component. These are additional information and do not depend on the signal penetration, therefore do not respect the actual state of the received signal. If the tropospheric corrections could be calculated directly from the received data, the corrections are more appropriate.
From the messages an average RTCM message can be generated
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taking all the local conditions in to the account and then delivered to the broadcast stations and the end users. The corrections can be estimated like an isoline map and produced to the function of geographical coordinates of λ, φ. The algorithm should produce different corrections for different areas, so depending on the location of the user separate messages can be generated to be broadcast.
This model can be calculated as a polynomial function and its degree has to be decided. This depends on the atmospheric conditions first, but the first degree estimation is satisfactory as the main objects (cyclone, anticyclone) can be modeled easily as semi stationary objects.
According to this model a super fine density of correction matrix could be defined and delivered, so a wide area can be covered with the homogeneous accuracy of service. Also, within smaller area there is no need for satellite communication that has the advantage in data latency. Along the average corrections a special component is broadcast to the user respect to the actual position.
The system has the following advantages.
1)As the reference stations are not necessarily set up near radio transmitters there is no interference between the receiver and the transmitter.
2)It is an independent network that has a very wide area for the correction matrix to be interpolated.
3)It has seamless accuracy over the whole territory.
4)It can be broadcast through existing telecommunication network within a common format e.g. RDS.
5)It has a better accuracy then correction broadcast from individual transmitters. The system is robust and integrity can be monitored from any number of locations.
6)There is a possibility for indicating the actual atmospheric conditions over the area of PGA. These conditions can serve as a basis for decision making for different fields of meteorological applications. The meteorological modeling, the determination of changes and the speed of changes are possible.
7)The measurement accuracy in static mode can be in the range
of dm.
8)In addition of the above there is access to the data collected by base stations for postprocessing purposes.
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V. Summary.
As in Hungary the DCI’s existing technology has been introduced lately, during the test procedure a lot of technical and technological thoughts have raised. The broadcast area is small, but still big enough to be possible for determine differences in RTCM or meteorological reason in GPS measurements. Cost effectiveness is always one of the main points of views. But the first reason is to make the service as accurate as it is possible. The described idea does not change anything in the technology but takes advantage on the fact that the RTCM message that the GPS receiver generates has an examinable component for more advanced correction procedure.
The meteorological data can be obtained from either the measurement sites or the RTCM messages differences. The difference between the two methods is that the collected data are respect to the ground level while the data from the generated messages are respect to the whole line of the signal penetration; therefore it is more appropriate for tropospheric modeling. This algorithm can provide improvement on the RDS (or advanced) DGPS services and we intend to develop it in the near future.
WHY JAPAN LOVES ROBOTS AND WE DON’T
Always looking to the future, Japanese businesses are pinning many of their industrial hopes on increasing use of factory robots.
So what if robots don’t pay back their investment right away? They are a great bet for improving manufacturing quality and
countering rising labor costs.
Andrew Tanzer and Ruth Simon in a factory where Matsushita Electric makes Panasonic VCRS, a robot winds wire a little thinner than a bum an hair 16 times through a pinhole in the video head, and then solders it. There are 530 of these robots in the factory and they wind, and then wind some more, 24 hours a day. They do it five times faster and much more reliably than the 3,000 housewives who, until recently, did the same job with microscopes on a subcontract basis in Japan’s countryside. The robots even inspect their own work.
A U.S. company can’t get this technology – even if there were an American consumer electronics industry to take advantage of it. Matsushita invented and custom-made all 530 wire-winders to gain a
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competitive edge.
Robots were invented here, and the U.S. still leads in advanced research, from robotic brain surgeons to classified undersea naval search-and-destroy robots. But when it comes to using robots to solve practical problems – on the factory floor and in everyday life – Japan has no equal.
What may sound like science fiction to most Americans is taken for granted by ordinary folk in Japan. The Japanese are now accustomed to having robots do everything from make sushi to perform Chopin. Ichiro Kato, a roboticist at Waseda University, designed Wabot, a famous piano-playing, music-reading robot. Says Kato: “There will be one or more robots in every house in the 21st century.”
Wabot’s creator expects to see robots in people’s homes doing dishes and washing floors. He envisions a humanoid robot with movable arms and a synthesized voice that will provide mobility and companionship to lonely old people. Kato, 64, says: “I’d like to live to see that day.” Advances in artificial intelligence will put all this in the realm of the probable.
You probably haven’t heard much about robots lately in the U.S., and for good reason. Robots have been an embarrassing disappointment for many American manufacturers. But in Japan companies of all sizes have embraced robots. The robots make it easier to quickly alter a production line to make several different product models. Japanese suppliers are in the forefront of these “flexible manufacturing systems,” in which robots play a crucial role.
Now the technology is moving beyond the factory into hospitals, concert halls and restaurants.
In 1988 Japan employed two-thirds of all robots in use in the world, and last year it installed about $2.5 billion worth of new ones. Compare this with the U.S., which added only about $400 million worth of robots last year. “The total population of robots in the U.S. is around 37000,” says John O’Hara, president of the Robotic Industries Association. “The Japanese add that many robots in one year.” To be sure, Japan has enough antiquated and small factories to leave its overall manufacturing productivity below that of the US. But robots will help narrow the lead. For example, U.S. carmakers are heavily robotized. However, the Japanese are installing new robots not simply to automate but also to make production lines more flexible. For ex-
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ample, Nissan’s newer auto plants can produce hundreds of different variations on a given car model simply by reprogramming robots that paint auto bodies and install car seats, engines, batteries, windshields, tires and doors. In Japan, even small companies use robots in simple applications such as welding.
It is one more example of Japan’s skill at grasping a new technology and putting it to work while others dither. It happened in consumer electronics, memory chip production and machine tools. Now it’s happening in robotics.
As Japan’s robot population grows explosively, the U.S. market for metal employees is inching up after falling sharply in the mid1980s. In February Deere & Co. decided to can the robots it uses to paint tractor chassis and hire humans. The robots take too long to program for endless permutations of paint orders. Whirlpool’s Clyde, Ohio washing machine plant has used articulated arms that resembled the human wrist, elbow and shoulder to remove washtubs from injection molding equipment. But the complex robots aren’t up to running around-the-clock production. Whirlpool gave up on the idea of using robots for this job, opting for fixed automation -a technology the U.S. excels in.
“Robots give you a lot of flexibility, but there’s also a lot of complication,” says James Spicer, a director of engineering operations at Whirlpool. “To lift one cylinder at a time you don't have to duplicate the motion of a human arm.”
So many other manufacturers have sent robots to the junkyard or slowed plans to add new ones that the U.S. robot industry is in shambles. Early robot producers like Westinghouse and General Electric abandoned robotics in the late Eighties because of disappointing sales. And one-time highfliers such as Unimation and Industrial Systems have disappeared into bigger companies, while Prab and Automata founder under heavy losses.
One of the few profitable U.S. robot companies is GMFanuc, a 50/50 joint venture between the carmaker and Fanuc, a leading Japanese robot maker. The venture last year earned a few million dollars on sales of $165 million. Japanese producers aren’t making any real money in robots, either. But many Japanese firms design and make robots for their own use to boost competitiveness and quality, so profits are not the issue. They don’t buy robots based on a spreadsheet
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showing payback periods.
Now U.S. companies, having invented industrial robots and licensed the technology to Japan back in the 1960s, are in the awkward position of licensing back new Japanese technology. Cincinnati Milacron, number three in the U.S. robot business, aided Matsushita Electric’s push into robotics by licensing it technology. Last year Milacron became a U.S. distributor for small welding robots produced by none other than Matsushita.
Why is Japan so robot-happy? It has to do with a lot more than economics. Japanese managers and government officials consider robots a key tool in combating a severe labor shortage at home. The alternatives would be moving the labor-intensive operations abroad or letting immigrants into Japan. The first alternative would deprive Japan of its manufacturing skills. “If you can fully automate manufacturing, there’s no reason you have to go to Southeast Asia,” argues Tadaaki Chigusa, a director of McKinsey & Co., Inc. (Japan). The second alternative, immigration, is unacceptable in the homogeneous, somewhat racist Japanese society.
While Chinese, Filipino or Korean laborers would not be very welcome in Japan, no such prejudice exists against robots. The Japanese seem to have been primed for robots with positive images in their popular culture as far back as the 1950s – much earlier than in the U.S. Japanese toymakers have churned out millions of toy robots, and the country’s cartoons and comic books are filled with robot heroes. The prototype is Astro Boy, developed in Japan in 19S3 and later exported to the U.S.
“Astro Boy is as well known in Japan as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are here,” says Frederik Schodt, author of “Inside the Robot Kingdom” (Kodansha International, 1988), which argues the Japanese have been conditioned to feel comfortable with robots from a young age. “He’s a very cute, friendly robot who’s always fighting for peace.”
Mostly, robots are portrayed favorably in Western popular culture nowadays, from Star Wars R2-D2 to the futuristic Jetsons cartoon family. However, in Western tradition, robots have frequently been stereotyped as soulless humanoid machines or evil characters in works such as Fritz bang’s 1920s silent Him Metropolis and the 1920 Czech play R.U.K. by Karel Capek, in which the word “robot” was coined to
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describe man-created monsters that turned on their masters.
In Japan, friendly, peace-loving robots are seen as solving a growing blue-collar labor shortage. The number of Japanese high school graduates is stagnant, and fewer graduates are willing to get their hands dirty. “Young people would rather work at the Hotel Okura or McDonald’s than in the factory,” says Naohkie Kumagai, associate director of Kawasaki Heavy Industry’s robot division. Shirking factory work doesn’t carry a heavy penalty: Last year’s typical high school graduate had 2.5 job offers to choose from.
Robots are more than a mere substitute for human labor. They can do some things better than humans. “Robots are becoming indispensable because they provide a precision, quality and cleanliness man can’t,” says Toshitsugu Inoue, senior engineer in Matsushita’s robot development department. Because robots work at a precise speed and don’t make mistakes, inventories are easier to control.
As electronic components are miniaturized, robots are becoming essential for quality and high yields in the production of everything from very large scale integration chips (some of Japan’s “clean rooms” are already unmanned) to watches and VCRS. The inverse is also true: Because Japanese manufacturers have robots; they can further miniaturize the product. The process is redefining the product. Many consumer electronic products are designed from scratch to be efficiently assembled by robots.
The Victor Co. of Japan JVC Ltd.’s Yokohama camcorder factory is bathed in an eerie silence. Automated guided vehicles quietly deliver pallets of components to 64 robots, which perform 150 assembly and inspection tasks. Two workers operate the robots, which assemble eight models on the same production line. Before the robots were installed in 1987, LVC needed 150 workers to do the same job. Just as important, JVC has redesigned the camcorder and its components, some almost microscopic, to be more efficiently assembled by robots. The robots also provide flexibility: They’ll work around the clock – no overtime, sick leave or bonuses.
Japanese government industrial planners have since the 1970s provided a raft of incentives for robot research, development and use. The government allows accelerated depreciation for purchase of sophisticated robots and established its own leasing company to provide low-cost robots to the private sector. Japan’s Ministry of International
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Trade & Industry provides small and medium-size companies with in- terest-free loans to buy robots; it is also pouring $150 million into developing hazardous-duty robots for use in nuclear power plants or fighting fires at oil refineries. This would be unthinkable in the U.S., because it smacks of industrial policy.
Politics and national differences aside, why has the U.S. lagged so far behind Japan in applying robots to manufacturing? “The companies selling robots plain lied about the capabilities of their equipment and the circumstances under which, they could perform,” says Roger Nagel, manager of automation technology for International Harvester (now Navistar Corp.) in the early 1980s and now a professor at Lehigh University. After struggling for two years to debug a robot brought in to load and unload stamped parts from a press, Nagel finally junked the robot. A Japanese customer would probably have worked more closely developing the robot with the supplier, incorporating ideas from the engineers and even from assembly workers on the customer’s own factory floor.
One reason for the overblown expectations is that U.S. robot engineers often came from the field of artificial intelligence and had little if any experience on the factory floor. They were enamored of the idea of a mechanical human, an idea readily embraced by corporate executives who hoped to replace workers in “lights out” factories.
“I’M A GURU WHEN I GET TO JAPAN”
When American industrialist Joseph Engelberger arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport in the spring of 1987, he was met by a limousine and whisked to the television studios of NHK, Japan’s national broadcast network. There Engelberger, who built the first industrial robot in 1961, was interviewed on a popular national news program. The conversation followed what had become to Engelberger a familiar pattern. “Didn’t the U.S. found the robot industry?” the interviewer asked. “Doesn’t Japan dominate it today?”
“We all have a good laugh about it,” says Engelberger, 64, who founded Unimation, the first robot-maker, and in 1968 licensed its technology to Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries. “I’m a guru when I get to Japan. I’m considered the founder of Japanese robotics.”
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He’s no guru at home. Here, few people not related to Engelberger recall his last big network TV appearance, when he instructed his robot to open a can of Budweiser and pour it for Johnny Carson on the “Tonight Show” in 1966. “I had a hard time getting people in the U.S. to take me seriously,” he says.
Engelberger’s exploits may have been good for a few laughs at home, but they caught the Japanese government’s attention. In 1967 it invited him to address 600 Japanese scientists and business executives. The session lasted five hours and led to an agreement with Kawasaki to license Unimation’s technology.
Kawasaki remains a powerhouse in robotics, but Engelberger’s Unimation has all but disappeared in the U.S. Its problems started almost immediately after its 1983 purchase by Westinghouse, which paid $107 million for Unimation with the hope of turning the $70 million company into a $1 billion business.
Unimation sold its first robot to General Motors in 1961 but was battered by CM’S 1982 decision to start its own robot company in partnership with Japan’s Fanuc. With Westinghouse putting little money into research and development, Unimation’s sales and market share withered. The hydraulic robots it pioneered were soon supplanted by newer and more versatile electric robots. Unimation’s West Coast researchers left en masse and formed Adept Technology, now a hot little maker of light assembly robots.
After years of heavy losses, Westinghouse sold Unimation’s two main operations – the robotics unit to Staubli International A.G., a private Swiss outfit, and its factory automation unit to AEG, a unit of Daimler-Benz.
Engelberger left Unimation in 1984 but remains a robot evangelist. His new venture, Transitions Research Corp., is developing robots for the service industry in a low-slung building in Danbury, Conn., down the road from Unimation’s former offices.
Engelberger isn’t hurting personally. He received around $5 million when Westinghouse bought Unimation, enough to buy a 62-foot sailboat with some money left over to continue researching robotics on his own. But he wishes his countrymen would pay him at least a fraction of the attention the Japanese pay him.
The result was overengineered robots that were costly and didn’t work well on the shop floor.
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“U.S. companies made robot hands that were so ungodly complex that in many cases they had no chance of standing up in a real industrial environment,” says Dennis Wisnosky, former vice president of GCA Industrial Systems Group, once the number two U.S. robot maker. The Japanese, by contrast, started with simpler robots such as spot-welders in car plants and then used their experience to build more complicated machines, such as robots that inspect the paint finish on car bodies with visual sensors.
In the U.S., robots have been slow to spread beyond automakers and their first-tier suppliers. A survey last year by Deloitte & Touche found less than 30% of U.S. manufacturers believed they had received significant benefits from new technology, down from more than 60% two years earlier.
It is a situation that should trouble those who recall the sad story of the U.S. numerically controlled machine tool industry. The technology was developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and then exploited by the Japanese. “U.S. manufacturers didn’t push the machine tool industry hard enough from a technology point of view,” says George Chryssolouris, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Japanese companies demanded more sophisticated machine tools so they could better compete in export markets. The result? When U.S. companies finally awakened to the need for sophisticated, high-quality tools, they were forced to turn to Japan.
One reason U.S. manufacturers aren’t pushing robot-makers as hard as their Japanese counterparts is that companies here tend to be run by salesmen or accountants.
Here, manufacturing engineers get scant respect; in Japan they frequently run companies. The best known include Honda’s Soichiro Honda and Sony’s Akio Morita. By contrast, it’s hard to name an American manufacturer who has made it to the top since the days of Henry Ford and Charles Kettering. While the Japanese revere manufacturers, Americans lionize entrepreneurs and inventors. That helps explain why a U.S. manufacturing engineer with a couple years experience makes only $37,000 a year, compared with $44,000 for a software applications engineer. Why should a smart American kid tinker with robots and assembly lines when he or she can strike it rich writing a new personal computer software program or designing a hedging strategy for an investment firm?
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