Funding is requested to support acquisition of workstations (1 Texas Instruments Explorer LX, and 3 Digital Equipment Corp. AI VAXstation-GPX) to upgrade the computing facilities at the Center for Automation and Intelligent Systems Research. This upgrade will benefit various research projects emphasizing artificial intelligence tools and techniques for enhancing the productivity of manufacturing industry. Some of the current projects are: investigation of meta-interpreters for expert systems, introspection capabilities in Rummelhart associative networks for pattern recognition and mechanization of discovery, a domain-independent expert system for scheduling, tactile sensing for robotic manipulation, and the use of expert systems to improve productivity in the production of "high-technology" metal parts with challenging specifications.
