Electrotopographic Modal Analysis for Modeling Adaptive Control Systems

This paper addresses itself to the pivotal problem of machine intelligence and adaptive control systems as they relate to the total automated manufacturing of critical engineering components in the metallurgical industries. A critical engineering component is one whose catastrophic failure can lead to loss of life, valuable property, and/or costly downtime. The paper provides a brief overview of the new science and technology of electrotopography (ETG) which has been under active development for more than two decades and is based upon a new type of robot sensor. The new sensors solve two major and historic problems with reference to adaptive controls and methodology, viz., the capability of performing a systems analysis on a product at any time during its manufacture, and doing this in a chemically specific manner. In other words, it is now possible to perform a systems analysis in terms of any single subsystem of the product.