Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART I BEGINNINGS
- PART II EARLY EXPLORATIONS: 1950S AND 1960S
- PART III EFFLORESCENCE: MID-1960S TO MID-1970S
- PART IV APPLICATIONS AND SPECIALIZATIONS: 1970s TO EARLY 1980s
- 17 Speech Recognition and Understanding Systems
- 18 Consulting Systems
- 19 Understanding Queries and Signals
- 20 Progress in Computer Vision
- 21 Boomtimes
- PART V “NEW-GENERATION” PROJECT
- PART VI ENTR'ACTE
- PART VII THE GROWING ARMAMENTARIUM: FROM THE 1980s ONWARD
- PART VIII MODERN AI: TODAY AND TOMORROW
- Index
- Plate section
18 - Consulting Systems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- PART I BEGINNINGS
- PART II EARLY EXPLORATIONS: 1950S AND 1960S
- PART III EFFLORESCENCE: MID-1960S TO MID-1970S
- PART IV APPLICATIONS AND SPECIALIZATIONS: 1970s TO EARLY 1980s
- 17 Speech Recognition and Understanding Systems
- 18 Consulting Systems
- 19 Understanding Queries and Signals
- 20 Progress in Computer Vision
- 21 Boomtimes
- PART V “NEW-GENERATION” PROJECT
- PART VI ENTR'ACTE
- PART VII THE GROWING ARMAMENTARIUM: FROM THE 1980s ONWARD
- PART VIII MODERN AI: TODAY AND TOMORROW
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
The SRI Computer-Based Consultant
As my colleagues and I at SRI cast about for ways to continue our planning and vision research we had been doing under the “Shakey the Robot” project, while satisfying DARPA's interest in militarily relevant applications, we hit upon the problem of equipment maintenance, repair, and training. We pointed out that any technology that could reduce expenditures for these items and lessen the need for utilizing scarce human experts would be extremely important to the military. Furthermore, we said, this need “cannot be satisfied merely by writing more and better manuals. A sophisticated computer system seems to us essential.”
We proposed to begin work on this problem by developing an environment in which an apprentice repair person would be given advice about how to take apart and reassemble a small air compressor. The advice would be generated (as needed by the apprentice) by a planning and execution system that would give suggestions about what to do next. The apprentice could ask for advice, using a predefined small vocabulary, which the system would analyze with state-of-the art speech recognition equipment, and then the system would answer, using a speech generation module. The system would also employ a machine-vision system to help keep track of progress and to observe components pointed to by the apprentice.
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- Information
- The Quest for Artificial Intelligence , pp. 224 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009