Oracle Tour of Robotics Lab

Our tour group at Oracle

One of the advantages with being involved with FIRST Lego League is sometimes you get access to people and companies that help you understand how technology/robotics is applied in the real world. The team and I got a chance to see how robots are used in helping companies store data. Our tour host warned us that this is not the type of robots you see in Star Wars like R2-D2. Although the robots we saw were not as glamourous as the movies, they were real workhorses.

I tell students that robots do the for "D" word jobs: Dirty, Dull, Dangerous and Difficult. I would generally categorize the job these robots performed as helping humans out of doing something Dull.

The robot's primary job is to retrieve tape cartridges and put them in hard drive to read and write data. Companies from all over the world will

A view of the Library with the kids hearing about how it works.

need access to these tape cartridges at some point. For some, it's to maintain backups. For others it might be to maintain data offsite. For whatever reason, when the user on the other end of the long line of cables requests information from the tape library, the robot finds the correct tape cartridge and inserts it into the tape reader which then sends or receives the data back to or from the user. The library was huge! One tape could house 5 terabytes of information and each library contained 10,000 tapes.

They used to have humans do this job of finding the right tape and inserting it into the drive. It was done by people on roller-skates. Here's even a short article on how IBM saved labor costs.

It takes mechanical, electrical and software engineers working
together to build this robot.

The kids were very interested in seeing how the robot performed its tasks. They learned that for every automation, there is a backup to keep the robot from failing. Weather it be in the software, the bar codes, the sensors or even the electrical supply, the designer has to think of all the possibilities for failure. With our Mindstorms NXT, we tried to do some, but we didn't do enough to maintain 100% consistent results. It's nice to know things fail in the real world too, but that there's a ton of hard work to keep that from happening.

The exposure that the kids got to the working environment, the people and the technology was invaluable. They don't have to wonder how math or science or engineering plays into the "real" world. They got a chance to see how they could be a part of engineering things in the future that might make life easier for the rest of us.

Click on the link to see the robot hard at work.