KISS also applies to automation
KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid
Early in my career I was assigned the task of commissioning an $70,000 electric paint robot. Unfortunately at that stage of robot evolution, the seal design at the robot joints prevented it from painting more than the first part. The vapors shorted it out. What I learned is that it is more effective to tackle automating the simplest tasks first. Simple tasks take less investment to automate. Even though modern 6 axis robots can now handle painting tasks, combining them with required sophisticated guard enclosures places them far from the KISS category in my mind.
I was watching a 2 axis gantry “robot” carry engine cylinder heads at a Honda assembly plant in Alabama. Reminded me of a dog playing fetch with a stick. The jaws of the gripper opened and the human at the end was presented with the retrieved cylinder head. I install gantry robot transport systems for the same benefit, their simple motion and guards allow humans to safely work along side them. These robots do not care that I am comparing them to a dog. As Ada Lovelace wrote as her work began the digital age “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform”
A Spaniel fetches a stick by Kleuske
Moore’s law marches on. The cost of computers has dropped to the point where we can afford to automate even simple tasks. It is easy to write down date, starting odometer, location, finishing odometer and purpose for one business trip. You get pissed off enough to invent a better way when you spend a chunk of every Christmas vacation inputting a list of a thousand or so business trips so that you qualify to keep the $8000 to $9000 dollar business mileage deduction. I want to use the KISS principle to fix all the aggravations in my life.
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