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Immobots Take Control
by Wade Roush, Technology Review,
December 2002/January 2003
Like a big-city airport with
flights arriving and departing on shared runways,
a copier’s biggest challenge is scheduling: it needs
to launch the next sheet of blank paper into the
printing system as soon as the previous one is out
of the way. But as Xerox’s previous generation of
copiers and printers became increasingly complex,
says Daniel Bobrow, an artificial-intelligence researcher
in PARC’s Systems and Practices Lab, the company
noticed that the process was taking more and more
time, especially when users selected options such
as two-sided copying, sorting, and stapling.
“Model-based programming is
doing a tremendous job for us in terms of improving
[copier] productivity,” says Bobrow. Owners of the
machines can add and remove components as they like,
and they can let the machines toil unattended for
hours.
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