• Question: How complicated are the automated control systems?

    Asked by _Miscellaneous_ to Simon, Norbert on 22 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Simon Lay

      Simon Lay answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hello, This can vary from relatively simple to pretty complicated. In a lot of cases we use Automation to track several moving pieces of equipment and ensure that one stops before it crashes into another. Other times Automation can be much more tricky. We use cameras to tell us where samlples are inside a vacuum vessel and use the signals from the cameras to drive a robot to the correct place to pick up the sample and move it into the X ray beam. This can be done hundereds of times during an experiment with different samples. It has to be done quickly and incredibly accurately. Time is money when running complex experiments with biological samples and the faster you can get the Robot and the Sample stages to transfer the various samples into an out of the beam the higher number of experiments you can get through in an hour.

    • Photo: Norbert Gogiel

      Norbert Gogiel answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hi!

      I worked a bit on automated control systems.

      First of all, this is the future of the industry and some those systems are used in robots and anything that is moving. Sometimes, you might have a human-in-the-loop which in other words is a system as simple as driving wheel but with a human doing some input. You turn the wheel and the wheels turn or pilot’s stick. Also, there are such machines as robots performing an operation for example, in London where the surgeon is in New York.

      There are systems with no human in the loop and they perform on the pre-programmed basis.

      Those systems can get really complicated when relating to complicated systems even with the human-in-the-loop like the one performing a surgery. You can also have a simple system performing a simple task for turning something.

      I hope this helps.

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