ROBOTS

I find the word robot interesting because it is one of the two Czech words that have been adopted by English (the other is polka). The word was coined by the formidable Czech writer Karel Capek in 1921 for his play "R.U.R" (Rossum's Universal Robots). He derived it from the Czech word robota; in Russian, as some readers may know, the word simply means "work," but in Czech, it means a special kind of work: the work serfs were forced to do in the fields of their Lord of the Manor.

Robots have been in the news in connection with the Chernobyl disaster: the Soviets contacted West Germany to enquire about robots for use in the burning reactor, presumably for fire fighting. They also contacted a number of other countries for help, which prompted Armand Hammer's protege and propagandist Michael Gale, M.D., to proclaim that a nuclear accident can no longer be managed by a single country.

Well, not if the country is the USSR. In the unlikely event that such an accident happened here, the US would hardly ask the Soviets, whose technology is brilliant only when it is military, for ox carts to help with the evacuation. Gale also praised the Soviet government for overlooking political matters and granting an Israeli bone-marrow surgeon a visa. That was really big of them to let him help; naturally, he was absent when Gorbachev received Gale, and the Soviet press jealously guarded the secret of his existence. It reminded me of the 1936 Olympic Games in Munich, when Hitler personally shook the hand of every winner after his race; but if the winner was Jesse Owens or another black, the Fuhrer was absent from his box.

But back to robots. The West Germans have indeed developed two robots, the MF3 and MF4, to operate in high-radiation areas. They are equipped with TV cameras and Geiger counters, and have been used for some 10 years for nuclear plant maintenance.

In America, the Grand Disaster at TMI stimulated the development of special robots to clean up the containment of Unit 2. The first two were developed by Carnegie-Mellon. Rover 1 could only measure radiation levels at various points in the structure, but Rover 2 was able to bring back samples, such as bits of the containment's inside wall, to see how deeply the contamination had penetrated.

A third robot, completed in July, will actually help with the clean-up:

its 23-foot manipulator arm can hold and handle a number of tools such as wrenches and scrapers. The entire clean-up will require half a dozen such robots, perhaps even one (I speculate) to sandblast the walls, which is the usual way of decontaminating them. The Electric Power Research Institute, an institute run by the utility industry, is sponsoring this type of research.

Robots are also used elsewhere in the energy business. They are being considered for coal mines, but perhaps the most advanced types are the submersible robots. They got a lot of publicity for snooping round in the Titanic, but they have been helping in offshore drilling for some time. They can inspect the situation at the bottom of the sea with a video camera, and their manipulator arms can do comparatively complicated jobs like tightening nuts or sawing material and generally assisting in the maintenance of drilling installations at depths of 3,000 ft and more. Some of them are free swimming others crawl on the bottom of the sea.

The heart of such contraptions is the microprocessor (five of them, actually, in this machine), the little brain on a chip. Its price has come down to about $20 -- plus many hundreds of thousands of dollars for the know-how to program it and for the auxiliary hardware.

Computer programs can now write and debug programs; they can adapt to unforeseen circumstances, learn from their mistakes and correct themselves; and they can also organize production and plan the logistics of its supplies.

What then?

Well, one scenario is described in Capek's "R.U.R.," translated into English in 1922.

[More: Like the literature on computers, that on "Robotics" is overwhelming. Some recent articles on the subjects above: J.B. Tucker, "Submersibles reach new depths," High Technology, Feb. 1986; 1. Peterson, "Stepping into danger," Science News, 12 Jul. 86; "Superpowers developing robotic warriors," FPI Intl. Rprt. (401 5^th Ave., New York, NY 10016),2 July 1986; G. Zorpette, "Robots for fun and profit," IEEE Spectrum, March 86. All of which is trivial compared with Capek's works. Like all great writers, he was 50 years ahead of his time: one of his plays, The White Disease, describes the dilemma of a pacifist confronted by a totalitarian state.]