Industrial Automation

Industrial Automation

Abstract

A clock radio goes on automatically, awakening a student from his nap with the sound of music. Meanwhile his sister turns on the video recorder to play back television shows that it had been programmed to record several nights earlier. The house has become chilly, but the furnace fires up to provide heat. These familiar occurrences are only a few examples of the ways in which automation has come to pervade daily life. The term automation, coined from the words automatic and operation, describes all such processes in which mechanical or electronic devices are employed to carry out tasks without human intervention.
Although fully automated systems were not developed until the 20th century, many simple, semi-automated devices were invented hundreds of years before. During the 1700s there appeared in England and Scotland a number of inventions that helped to bring about the first Industrial Revolution.
By the late 1930s, electronic amplifiers and circuits had reached a stage of development where they could be employed to perform control tasks. But perhaps more important to the advancement of automation was the work of the United States mathematician Norbert Wiener.
In his book Cybernetics: On Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), Wiener unified the findings of the research on control and information transmission of the first half of the century and thereby provided a theoretical base for the creative use of automatic control that has revolutionized technological systems.