Appendix

This meeting brought together researchers from around the world to discuss manufacturing automation and related technologies. The participant and manuscript breakdown is as follows.

(2) "The Role of Quality Engineering (Taguchi Methods) in Developing Automatic Flexible Manufacturing Systems," G. Taguchi, Japanese Standards Association

• Design and Tuning of Robotic Systems

Of the 235 papers accepted for the meeting, 165 were from Japan and 70 Session Titles from the United States. Of the 220 papers published in the Proceedings, the major contributors were as follows: Japan 105, U.S. 61, China 17, Korea 8, Italy 6. During 38 technical sessions there were 203 presentations, with 9 joint papers from the Japan and the United States and 7 between other countries.

Universities provided a larger percentage of papers than industry for all countries, as the following ratios show: Japan, 66/34; U.S., 93/7; Europe, 94/6, Asia, 76/24, others, 100/0. The 38 technical sessions can be grouped into the following general topics (with number of sessions on each topic): robotics (9), manufacturing (9), computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) (7), control (5), vehicles (4), others (4).

Keynote Speeches

(1) "Fuzzy Logic in Control and Decision Analysis," L. Zadeh, University of California at Berkeley

(2) "Market-Oriented FMS and CIM: A Megatrend for '90's Manufacturing Industries," T. Yamazaki & A. Nagae, Yamazaki Mazak Corp.

Plenary Speeches

(1) "Environment Surrounding Flexible Automation," H. Edmondson, Hewlett-Packard Co.

• Robot Manipulator Control

• Technology of Mobile Robots

Autonomous Mobile Robots in Unstructured Environment

⚫ CIM and FMS Concepts

⚫ FMS and FMC Technology

• Mechatronics-Micro Mechanics and Fine Motion Control

⚫ Modelling and Identification for Dynamical Systems

Control of Manipulators with Redundancy

• Artificial Intelligence Application for Flexible Automation

Motion and Force Control of Robot Manipulators

• Motion Planning and Control in Automated Systems

• Path Planning and Concept Formation for Vehicles

• Intelligent Vehicle Navigation In and Out of Factories

• Dynamical Systems and Control

• Adaptive Control Applied for Mechatronics

• Learning Control in Robotics • Manufacturing Process Sensor Systems

• Manufacturing Process Monitoring and Control

• New Manufacturing Process Control and Analysis

• Flexible Assembly and Theoretical Analysis

• Robot Cell Planning and Control ⚫ FMS and Intelligent Simulators

• Robot Control in Constrained Environment

• Control of Flexible Manipulators

• Robot Hands and Manipulators with Compliance

• Quality Issues and Flexible Automation

• Automatic Inspection

• Distributed Parallel Robot Systems • FMS Planning

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the field of optical computing has been rapidly broadened into various areas, such as investigations of optical analog and/or digital data processing and optical and optoelectronic phenomena and devices for optical computation. An optical computer is a computer in which light is used somewhere. This can mean fiber optical connections between electronic components, free space connections, or one in which light functions as a mechanism for storage of data, logic, or arithmetic. The main motivation of many recent studies of optical computing is the increasing interest in developing a new parallel computing system capable of processing large amounts of data at high speed, and my own interests in the subject are centered on this potential application.

My aim was to discover how close optical computing is to being of use to the constituency of numerical computing that I represent and to gain some understanding of the ways digital optical computing and neural computing overlap. In my opinion, most scientists engaged in mainstream scientific computation have little knowledge of neural computing and even less of optical computing. Nevertheless, these are well established scientific fields with thousands of researchers, professional societies, journals, and international meetings. For example, Optical Computing '90, held in Kobe, Japan, 8-12 April 1990, was a major conference on this topic with almost 500 attendees. (See below for my summary and evaluation and an overview of this meeting

by David K. Kahaner and H.J. Caulfield

by a leading expert in optical computing, Prof. H.J. Caulfield.)

Optical computing is seen by a number of Japanese as an essential direction for computing research. Here are some examples of their comments:

The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI): "Electronics is the science of the 20th century, and optics is the science of the 21st."

• Dr. Izuo Hayashi, Director of the Optoelectronics Technology

Research Laboratory (OTL) in Tsukuba: "The combination of photons and electrons will create new kinds of system which we cannot imagine just using an extension of today's technology. For instance, imagine real 3D integration, by which I mean wafer-to-wafer communication, vertically, by light, so that we can make stacks of hundreds of wafers by integration. Once we master optoelectronic integration technology we can begin to imagine new architectures."

• Dr. Ken-ichi Kitayama, supervisor at NTT Transmission Systems Laboratories: "[ATT Bell Labs] are looking at the short term target rather than the longer term target, and it seems that all their efforts are now concentrated on 1995. ... But NTT's long term goal is to establish optical processing technology and to fully exploit massive parallelism by optical means. This will produce new types of optical devices and an optical architecture. We expect that in the long run, research in a broad range of areas will be fruitful. So for now, we consider this to be a basic research phase, not the practical development phase. ... The photoelectronic or optoelectronic computer is the direction of the future." WHAT IS OPTICAL COMPUTING?

The concept of passing light through lenses to perform computations is not new. I took a course on this in the 1960s. The fundamental idea can be illustrated by noting that a simple lens

• Prof. Takeshi Kamiya, Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Tokyo: "Compared to the U.S. we have a wider variety of research groups in Japan that are developing devices dedicated to optical computing.... In the U.S., I think there is a wider variety of groups looking for new architectures for optical computing.”

Fourier transform of its input in real time for arbitrarily complicated image, whereas using digital computation the effort increases rapidly with the number of data points or pixels. Using a lens in this way is an entirely analog process, and most of the early research considered computation in analog terms very much like it was described in the days of analog computing.

In recent years, developments have centered on digital calculations, by using optical devices for logic, memory, or