TELEO PERATORS AND HUMAN AUGM ENTATION
manipulator was completed. This manipulator is still predominant in the atomic energy industry and is manufactured commercially.
-1954. Ray Goertz built an electric master-slave manipulator incorporating
servos and force reflection (sense of touch or "feel") (fig. 6). The master-slave
position control ofthe manipulator arms and hands plus force reflection made
this the first bilateral electric manipulator.
-1954. The General Purpose Robot (GPR) was built at the AEC's Savannah
River Plant. This was the first general-purpose manipulator-equipped vehicle.
-1957. Professor Joseph E. Shigley, at the University of Michigan, built a primitive walking machine for the U.S. Army. Although many walking machines
were built earlier, Shigley's inaugurated the present-day Army program in "offroad" locomotion.
-1958. First mobile manipulator with TV was built at ANL. This teleoperator
was called a "slave robot."
-1958. RalphS. Mosher and coworkers at General Electric built the
Handyman electrohydraulic manipulator incorporating force feedback, articulated fingers, and an exoskeletal control harness. This equipment was built for
the joint AEC-USAF Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Program.
-1958. William E. Bradley, Steve Moulton, and associates at Philco
Corporation developed a head-mounted miniature TV set that enabled an operator to project himself visually into the operating space.
-1961. The first manipulator was fitted to a manned deep-sea submersible
when a General Mills Model150 manipulator was installed on the Trieste.
-1963. The U.S. Navy began deep-submergence projects, including the development of underwater manipulators.
-1963. R. A. Morrison and associates at Space-General Corporation constructed a lunar walking vehicle (fig. 7). This machine was later converted into
a "walking wheelchair" for handicapped children.
-1964. Neil J. Mizen and coworkers at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory reported on the construction of a "wearable exoskeletal structure." The Cornell
exoskeleton was not pwered (fig. 8).
-1965. Ray Goertz and his associates at ANL combined the ANL Model E4
electrical master-slave manipulator with a head-controlled TV camera and
receiver.
- 1966. ANL combined the Model E3 electric master-slave with the Mark TV2,
head-controlled TV, which added translational motion to the viewing system.
-1966. Case Institute of Technology, working under a NASA grant, demonstrated a computer-controlled manipulator that can perform preprogrammed
subroutines specified by the operator.
This chronology gives little hint of the imminent and intimate man-machine partnership that many believe essential to the large-scale exploitation of space and the
oceans. Many of the most important developments listed were made under the aegis of
the Atomic Energy Commission. Further developments are likely from many sources.
Notes
1 "Unilateral" means that there is no kinesthetic or force feedback as there is in a "bilateral" system. See pages 86 & 87 for
definitions of the various kinds of teleoperators.
This excerpt is from the report by Edwin G. Johnsen and William R. Corliss, Washington, D.C.: 1967.
/92
. An Interview with Patricia
Cowings
Ron Eglash
The following is an edited interview with Patricia Co wings, director of
the Ames-NASA Psychophysiology Laboratory. an September 10, 1993.
Ron Eglash: How about introducing yourself.
Patricia Co~ings: Well,_ I'm the director of the psychophysiology lab; we study the relation
between bram and behavior. Our lab has been working on developing methods for getting people
to adapt more quickly to micro-gravity, and to re-adapt to earth.
. RE: ~nd it's specifically motion-sickness that you're concerned with ...
PC: Motion-s_Ick~ess is the first_ indication your body gives you that something's wrong here.
Because ~e d1dn t evolve In a micro-gravity environment, an awful lot of things go to heck in a
han_dcart '" short order. Space motion-sickness is the first overt sign of maladaptation to that
environment.
RE: And yo ur approach to a solution?
PC· As
h h · 1 ·
. · . psyc 0 P ys1o og1sts, ~e have to monitor physiology and behavior of the subject in a specifIc environment t~at causes h1m or her to stress. So first thing we do when we bring people here is
we make them Sick, usmg a variety of insidious devices made by NASA specifically for that purpose. We do that because motion -sickness per se is a completely artificial disease. The subject is
93}
EGLASH
AN INT ER VIEW WITH PATRICIA COWINGS
analog electronics, digital electronics, and a battery pack-sort of like Batman's utility belt-and a
nine-track tape recorder that's good for 24 hours. Its an intelligent system: on the wrist is a very
small compu~er display that continuously shows the subject their own heart rate, respiration,
blood flow, skm conductance, and tells them if the machine is malfunctioning, like if an electrode
fell off. Plus it tells time.
TRIAXIAL
RE: So they can use this as biofeedback?
ACCELEROMETER
PC: ~ell, that's an instrum·ent used in space. In the laboratory we teach our
s~hJects to control up to 20 different physiological responses
s1multaneously. They si t in front of a wide-screen oscilliscope that can display four analog signals at a time, like t he raw respiratory waveform for example. Mounted above are 12 digital meters th~t sh o~ the information in numeric form. In addition to giving th em both digital
and analog v.Isual displ ays, we have two auditory tones. We spend quite a bit of our time just
teachi ng subJects how to utilize this much information witho ut having sensory overload. And
part o.f my j~b is to see which kinds of parameters John Doe responds to better. Some people look
at a visual display and all of their attention leaks right out of their heads. Some people wa nt you
to talk to the.m continuously; some want you to shut up. Part of what 1 do is very much like being
a co~ductor ~ ~ a band. I see all the feedback all the time. And I direct the subject's attention by
turning the display on and off. So in the first two hours we gradually introduce more and more
:e~dback ~isplays in different combinations to see how this person responds. Part of the training
IS In teaching them to cross-reference these signals to get a feel for how they're doing. For example, you can see breaths per minute by looking at the meter, but you can also see volume by looking at the analog signal.
RESPIRATION
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RE: There was a 1989 National Research Council Report that was very critical of
biofeedback, but they singled out your studies as an exception, a case of
clearly successful use.
(8\/PifEMP)
PC: Well, I noticed t hat too. But you know, nobody else in the world noticed it!
RE: So why are you singled out as the successful biofeedbacker?
The Autogenic-Feedback System-2 (AFS-2). An ambulatory monitoring system as worn by crewmembers.
perfectly well when he comes in the door, usually better than average heal~h. We systematical!~
make them sick so we can see how their body responds to the onset of the stimulus, and how their
response levels change as you increase stimulus intensity (I hope I don't sound sadistic). When they
say, "Turn this thing off or I'm going to throw up," you turn it off and see how rapidly th~y return
to their own baselines. No two people respond in exactly the same way. A single person Will always
respond this way. He produces a kind of physiological fingerprint. I can go through a few hu~dred
records and identify John Doe, because that's how he responds-in the motion-sickness environment, or darned near any environment that causes him emotional distress.
RE: And these are autonomic nervous system parameters you record?
PC: Yes, we call the data-a picture of the person if you will -an "autonomic stress profile.' ~ou
may see people making larger-magni tude changes in the cardiac system th an in the gastrointestinal system for example; it's a hierarchy of response magnitudes and latencies.
RE: So basically were talking about a lot of sweat here.
~C: Yeah, a lot of work; we also have a somewhat unique methodology. Neal Miller, my co- inves-
tigator, has often said that there are as many different methods for doing biofeedback as there
are clinicians. We've tried to find the right combination of methods, and see if we could refine it
a~d. s.tandardize it. NASA only gave us 5 hours to train each astronaut. I've told my methods to
cliniCians and they say "What, am I in a hurry?" We had to demonstrate that we could make it
work in a large population, under a variety of stimulus conditions. I'm glad you mentioned that·
other people have said "Oh, but the NIH said that biofeedback is bunk," and I have to show the~
that one page t hat said "But Pat's OK."
RE: Could you say something about that Washington Post article-you talked
about a contrast between conventional medicine and behavioral medicine.
RE: Could you describe the apparatus that's hooked up to these people?
·
· 1 • 1
·t ·
stem called
PC: In our research we developed for space, we devised a physiO og1ca mom onng sy
AS2 · we told the crew it's the latest thing in astronaut underwear. Its a wide stretch garment. that
has 'holes where ECG electrodes are placed. All electrodes and transducers are tied to a
umbilicus cable and are tied down to the garment with velcro, including measures of ECG, re~pition skin conductance and peripheral blood flow, as well as three axes of head acceleration.
ra
'
'
h t have
We designed this to be very comfortable; around the waist there are 3 x 1 inch squares t a
siOg~e
{94
PC: Unlike people in academia, or even in the clinical worl d, I've been working for t he last 21
years on one problem-and I've been required to demonstra te an objective basis for what I'm sayIng (laughter). Seriously, I've performed large-scale formal experiments over and over again ...
PC: Contrast or contest? You mean within the agency?
RE: Well, I was trying not to make it sound like a leading question, but.... Let's
start outside the agency.
~C: I don't know about the rest of the world- l've lived with t his agency since I was a baby, you
t now ~ha.t I mean? I came _here full-time when I was 23, and I worked as a grad student before
hat. Within NASA, when I first came on board, it was in the fat days. They had known for twenty
95}
AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA COWINGS
years that they had a big problem with space motion-sickness, and nothing worked. So they said
"let's try anything-acupuncture, whatever." So that's how I got my foot in the door.
RE: And were you the one who suggested biofeedback?
PC: Yes. In my first year in grad school I had a course in the applied school of engineering. The
class was to design some feature into a space shuttle from the point of view of the future user.
The course was inundated with engineers designing zero-gravity tables and such. I told the
instructor that he had to let me in the class, because there were
no women, and so who was going to design the curtains? And he had
no life-sciences people in the class, and as far as I knew astrona uts were alive (although I've since
worked with quite a few of them and now I wonder about that). I spent a year researching the
literature to see the current biomedical problems, and motion-sickness was at the tippy-top. And
my doctoral thesis work was on combining autogenic therapy with biofeedback to get more
effective control of cardiovascular responses. So I wrote a paper for him on possible applications
of "visceral learning" (that's what we called it in those days) to problems in manned space flight.
He turned out to be the director of Ames Research Center. And every time we did a study, the
critics would say "Yes, but you didn't show men and women," so we would test that, and they
would say, "Yes but you didn't control for age," so we would test that, and so on. By the time the
NIH study came out we had done everything on the face of the planet.
RE: 1 read that previous studies had shown women being more susceptible to
motion-sickness, but that your results were pretty much equal between men
and women.
PC: (laughing) Yeah, it's funny. Every reference says, "We all know women are more susceptible to
motion-sickness than men." Finally you go back, and the original source is only two papers: one
from a shipboard physician in the 1800s (and women used to faint a lot in the 1800s, I think it
was those corsets); the other study was by the Navy. They ran 15 women and 15 men, and the
women were more susceptible than the men. But the men were all active-duty military, in excellent physical condition, and the women were all secretaries and housewives. They did no matching for physical fitness.
RE: Didn't that study claim there was no pulse change during motion sickness?
PC: Yes, that study was absolutely astonishing. When I went to Russia they were all having a big
laugh over it. Because you'll get a pulse change, y'know, just from a telephone conversa tion
(laughter). So we assumed the methods were flawed.
RE: Seems like a reasonable assumption. Now let's go back to that conventional
versus behavioral-medicine contrast. That's just about pharmaceuticals versus the biofeedback?
PC: No it isn't- unfortunately its much more than that. I'm not a Christian Scientist: I don't think
there's anything wrong with conventional medicine. And I certainly don't think there's anything
wrong with pharmaceuticals. Th ey were ineffective in space because we don't metabolize _things
in space the way we do on earth. The positive fluid shift and diarrhesis causes electrolyte Imbalance, so one can't predict how it will be metabolized from one day to the next. The cu rr~nt
motion-sickness drug is really nothing more than an anti-histamine, and t he dose that they_ ~~ve
you is enough to put an elephant to sleep. It helps if you're suffering from intractable vo~ltmg,
but all it does is put you out. That's an operational fix; its not solving the problem of adaptmg to
that environment, nor examining why one person adapts and the other doesn't.
RE: Yes, the idea of individual responses, each of us with our own stress pr ofile.
EGLASH
" average" response.
PC: It is the reason why conventional medicine, even vestibular physiologists, were unable to see
the effects of motion-sickness on the autonomic nervous system. Ken Money did a study, 1970, 1
think, where some people's heart rate went up, some went down, one person didn't respond the
same from one test to another. That's because they didn't see that the individual was consistent
within him or her self. Yes, maybe one test takes 15 minutes to make you sick, and the other test
takes 95 minutes to make you sick, but if you look at the physiology at the point where they have
become sick it's the same.
RE: Would it be possible to have the pharmaceutical industry use something like
this? Have drugs that are specific to particular categories of stress profiles?
PC: Up to a point. Pharmaceutical companies can't make money if they're trying to tailor an
aspirin to each individual. And perhaps a physician could combine drugs in a more efficient way
for the crew members. But, say, a scopolamine and dexedrine combination won't affect you the
same on one day and another, depending on whether or not you've exercised that day, or depending or whether or not you're depressed that day. Drugs by their nature have a systemic effect on
an individual. But you could use it to say, 'This category of drug is no good for this individual."
RE: So the conventional/behavioral medicine contrast is more a question of
group versus individual?
PC: I'll tell you for your tape recorder. The problem is much more fundamental than that. They
went to medical school, and we did not. And we have the cheek-the temerity!-to try and solve a
biomedical problem. And I'm sure you'll see this across the board in other clinical applications in
biofeedback. But within this agency, where we have a bunch of aeronautical engineers and hardheaded rocket jockies, biofeedback seems like California tofu. The first time 1 met with a shuttle
commander, he said (imitating a Texas drawn "So whaddya all do, sit in the corner in a lotus position and chant?" So with the astronauts we present it as an exercise regimen, "You're learning to
control other muscles." And because they can see them going up and down they say "Oh yeah
~~m~~"
'
RE: it seems like the causal chain of the pharmaceutical is very Newtonian. You
have this chemical and then a reaction to it. Whereas with biofeedback its
more complex.
PC: Well, there's ways of looking at a problem. In this country, if you have a problem you have a
headache you take an aspirin. And if there is a pill for your problem, then by all means go find it.
But what we are dealing with is a body cast in an alien environment. Rapidly de-adapting to
earth and re-adapting to space has somewhat traumatic effects on organ systems.
RE: Let me try a philosophic question. We are often told that it's symbolic systems like speech and writing that are the only significant conveyors of knowledge. That view leaves our bodies as inert blobs of mechanics or chemistry.
Does the body get to have the status of an information-processing system in
your work?
PC: I don't know what you're talking about. Look, all of your organs are attached to your nervous
system; your spinal cord, etc. is attached to your cerebrum. Nobody knows where volition is in the
brain. The only way I have of communicating with these people is verbally. I can't talk to monkeys
or to my dog. This is considered a reliable ...
RE: Whoa, wait-1 wasn 't trying to imply some kind of mystical interpretation. 1
seems like a completely different picture of human physiology than we get
just wanted to know if you' re storing all this information on a computer: what's
the baud rate of these autonomic parameters?
from, say, a commercial pharmaceutical that is supposed to help some sort of
PC: You have to think of it a little differently. What I'm storing is evidence of something that has
{ 96
97}
EGLASH
AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICIA COWINGS
already happened. That's what people see as the subjective evidence of the effect. But what is the
effect? You have to think of the brain as wetware. I have trained over three
hundred people, and have never come across anyone that couldn't control their responses up to
some point. Neal Miller said he has never come across an animal that couldn't control their
responses up to some point. The difference between working with rats, even dogs or monkeys, is
that when you work with people they are very, very complicated animals, and they can all arrive
at the same place by completely different paths. So I think of the subject as a
black box, as a sensory organism, a data-processing organism. 1
modify the information that goes in through his senses, and look at the output. I have no idea
how he's getting that, but until I get the output I want I keep modifying the input. And it works.
RE: Why is it we can't just take our own pulse, or breathing rate? Why do we
need a machine to monitor our bodies for biofeedback?
PC: It's just a function of paying attention. Most people aren't aware of bodily sensations that
reflect autonomic changes. I can teach you to control the blood flow to the little finger of your
left hand, only. Can you sense changes in the blood flow to the little finger of your left hand?
RE: Well, no, not unless I had a nice machine hooked up to it.
PC: Well if you have a nice machine hooked up to it you could detect shifts of tenths or hundredths of a degree. Then you could learn to focus your attention tightly enough. "What am 1
feeling here that reflects blood flow to the periphery?" And yes. some people can hear their own
heartbeat, faintly, but if you're trying to teach a person to control a pattern of physiological
responses, you have to provide them with information on twenty things simultaneously. It's very
difficult for him to feel without first being instructed on how to feel it. Part of our training was
to sort out how to provide this much information in a useful manner.
RE: So it's not just a human-machine interface; it's a machine-mediated coupling between the autonomic nervous system and the central nervous system.
PC: Yes, you could think about it that way-it serves as a prosthetic for the nervous system.
RE: Before we end, I'd like to know a bit more about your own history and background.
PC: Well, I'm a Black woman, I'm married, and I'm short-five- foot-two-and I'm not telling my
weight. I have a six-year-old son, a brother who's a two-star general, another who's a jazz musician, and the third is a disk jockey-yeah, he's having a lot of fun with that...
RE: How about your early influences, growing up?
PC: I grew up in the South Bronx. My mother was a teacher's aide, my father was a grocery store
owner. I was the only girl in a family with three brothers. I noticed that men got to do everything:
firemen, policemen. I also noticed that white people got to do everything. None of my teachers
were Black: none of the policemen were. So I figured there really wasn't much that I could be.
One day 1958 I think, I was about 9 years old, I went to my dad, and I said, "I'm never going to be
able to have a job." He said "No, what you are is a human being, and the human being is the best
damned animal on the whole damned planet. A human being is just a little animal. It doesn't
have much fur, it doesn't have claws, and it doesn't have teeth. But what he has that sets him
apart from the other animals is a whole huge brain up on the end of his neck; it's like an infor-
PC: Sure,
. As.tmov, and Andre Norton That
h but the first for me was Robert Heinlein • Also Le Gutn,
was w Y 1 took a class on engineering space environments even h
major. And from there to NASA and I've loved it ever since. I
e~en me~ ~~~~~b::~ ~epsy~h~logy
.
~f the. rare people who ca n't get motion sickness. It turns out he has no osteolyths r:. d ::u~~e
ttonal tnner ear, and ... you can guess the rest. I was also the first woman to take the ,spa/ t . mg test. And I helped with the training for Mae Jemison I really felt wh
I
e ramNASA that what we were doing was some of the m t . .
en came to work for
os tmportant work that a human being could
d W ,
.
.
o. ere the ftrst animal to evolve enough to actually leave the planet of
..
RE: How have ou
.
" .
. . .
our ongtn.
.
y
negottated the mtnortttes tn science" stuff?
~C: Oh, ~ee~~ ltk~ ev~ry official who comes by wants to drag me out for a do
Look, mmontles In SCience. See? There goes one now" And I'
ed somewhere to make another
unp~id spee~h~
sh~w.
and
gb . po n.y
ways emg mvlt-
1
RE: Wha~ do you think about using science fiction to help students get interest-
:c:
ed tn sctence?
Oh, that's. great. I've b~en writing science f iction myself for about 100 years. They've turned
own my stones so many times I get rejection letters on a first-name basis.
RE: In folklore studies we find that there are lots of American stories that tur
out to have origins in West Africa. Do you think your father's story could hav:
had an African origin?
PC: I honestly don't think so. My father ran a grocery store, but his father was a law er And h.
~:t~·~rt~~~ ::.'~~ee.reT~sey cambe to those kinds of c.onclusions from the society they wer: r~ised in.'~
·
never een any such ment1on.
RE: Let me ask another question in that same area Your brother ·,s a ·a
.
c·
N
·
·
·
J zz must-
tan.
ow Jazz ts something new, it was invented here in America. But it also
::s some Afrtcan roots to it. Its not a symbolic code, like story-telling, but
ere ts tnformatton there in the waveform.
~C: ~h , well, ~ k~o~ all ab?ut waveforms ! But I think it would be a real stretch to say that readIng s eet mus1c IS l1ke readtng a polygraph printout.
RE: Well, you look at sheet music and you can see a waveform of pitch over
t 1me.
;;;,':,~·~;~~:~'
doto. ""''" oooiogy b•tweoo thot o~d :~,~~~;h;,":~h:,:,':
PC: I can see patterns in the polygraph, but then I was trained to lo k
; " ' " " ' ;, 0 "'
,
It's actual;y kind of ~:~~i~~nt~~: : : a~~osth~rs a;d I have anything in common with each other.
pr ng rom the same parents. We're all different colors
too, but that's beside the point.
RE: One last question. You said that you write your own science fiction stories
Are any of them in the cyborg theme? Blurring the boundary between the nat~
ural and the artificial?
PC: Yeah, in fact, j ust about everything I've written does that.
mation factory. One day someone looked at a bird and said, 'I wish I could fly: Now humans can
fly higher and f aster than any bird. Because a human being ca n learn, it can learn to do anything,
and you can do anything other human beings can do." It's the same story I tell my six-year-old.
And I literally started studying human potential at that point. I guess that might have spa rked mv
interest in science fiction to some extent.
RE: You must have been a major Star Trek fan.
{98
99}