Lonnie Love, a control engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for example, has long used data acquisition to glean important information on how a robot will act in certain situations. He uses the data to program the controllers that power the robots made by the laboratory. The laboratory, owned by the U.S. Department of Energy, mainly does energy research. The robotics division in which Love works primarily studies nuclear waste cleanup, he said. The division also designs robots used by the U.S. military.
Love programs the controllers that literally control the robot's inner workings.
So we use data acquisition to figure out how we're going to drive those motors, based on the information we get about them. One of the systems Love and his team recently designed is a robot that loads bombs on the wing of an airplane. Force sensors on the robot tell it how much the bomb weighs so that it can exert the proper amount of force needed to lift the load. Other force sensors interpret the amount of force applied by the human giving the robot commands. The robot interprets all this information via the software program that runs the controller.