Freddy II

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Freddy II was an experimental assembly robot built in the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (later Department of Artificial Intelligence) at Edinburgh University in the early 1970's. The project was initiated and overseen by Donald Michie. The hardware was designed and built by Stephen Salter (who also pioneered renewable energy from waves (see Salter Duck). It consisted of a video camera, a fixed arm and hand over a moving table. The software, developed by a team led by Rod Burstall (see reference below) used the POP-2 programming language. The computing hardware was an Elliot 4130 computer, with 384K (sic) RAM and a hard disk, linked to a small Honeywell computer for control. Freddy was a versatile system which could be trained and reprogrammed to perform a new task in a day or two. The tasks included putting rings on pegs and assembling simple model toys consisting of wooden blocks of different shapes, a boat with a mast and a car with axles and wheels.

The hardware (no longer functioning) and a film of Freddy assembling a model can be seen in the Chambers Street Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Some technical features were:

  • the versatility of the system and ease of retraining and reprogramming for new tasks
  • the idea of moving the table instead of the arm which simplified the construction
  • a method of recognizing the parts visually by using graph matching on the features
  • a collection of high level procedures for programming the arm movements; these could be reused for each new task

[edit] References

  • Ambler A P, Barrow H G, Brown C M, Burstall R M, Popplestone R J and Turner K J (1973). A versatile computer controlled assembly system, Proc. Third Internat. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence pp 479-485, Stanford.
    • Ambler A P, Barrow H G, Brown C M, Burstall R M, Popplestone R J and Turner K J (1975). A versatile system for computer controlled assembly, Artificial Intelligence 6(2): pp 129-156. (An extended version of the above).
  • Barrow H G and Burstall R M (1976) Subgraph isomorphism, matching relational structures and maximal cliques, Information Processing Letters 4(4): pp 83-84.(On the algorithm used for recognizing the parts visually)