Production tools are an important symbol that reflects the productivity level of an era. Marx once stated in "Das Kapital": The means of labor are the scale of the development of human labor and are also the indicators of the social relations in which labor is located. Since ancient times, humans have created many machines that reduce or replace human labor through automatic devices, which have also invisibly promoted the changes in production relations, from human-driven and animal-driven to steam-driven, electrical-driven, Internet-driven, and digital-driven. This revolution is a reflection of the gradual strengthening of the leading role of "people" in production. It is also a brilliant achievement in the gradual separation of human wisdom from basic labor and the realization of higher-level applications.
1. Automation genes in the process of productivity changes
Automation technology is formed and developed closely around production needs. Through mechanization changes, people's position in industry gradually changes from tool to leading creative role. This concept is still being explored and developed today.
In ancient China, they invented the copper kettle dripper that keeps time by itself, the compass that uses gear transmission to indicate the direction, and the revolving lantern that uses aerodynamics, etc. In 1637, Song Yingxing, a famous scientist in the Ming Dynasty, wrote the book "Tiangong Kaiwu". The book includes agriculture and handicrafts, such as machinery, bricks, ceramics, paper, weapons, gunpowder, textiles and other production technologies. It is the world's most comprehensive work on agriculture and handicraft production, and it records a large number of special production technology and equipment.
In Europe in the seventeenth century, with the development of production, a variety of automatic devices appeared one after another. In 1642, a French physicist invented an adder that could carry automatically; in 1657, a Dutch mechanic used the pendulum theory to invent a clock. In the eighteenth century, as the bourgeoisie fully established its dominance through the "Glorious Revolution" and the parliamentary system, in order to further improve production efficiency, early capitalists used water conservancy and animal power to drive production tools, and the factory handicraft capitalist economy developed greatly.
At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, Britain was in urgent need of a new source of power in order to pump water from the mines and turn the wheels of new machinery. After a series of inventions and improvements, a steam engine suitable for mass production was developed, realizing the use of machines. Instead of manpower, a revolution was completed in which large-scale factory production replaced manual production in individual workshops.
Since the twentieth century, automation technology has entered a critical period of theoretical formation. In order to solve technical problems such as artillery control, torpedo navigation, and aircraft navigation raised in the military, classical control theory was formed with the analysis and design of single-variable control systems as its main content. In 1946, the American Ford Company first proposed the term "automation" to describe the automatic operation of the production process, and established a production automation research department in 1947.
In the 1950s and 1960s, classical control theory was unable to solve major research issues such as aerospace engineering. Modern control theory emerged with the core of the maximum value principle, dynamic programming and state space method. At the same time, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence have developed, and intelligent robots and expert systems have gradually matured.
In the mid-1970s, automation applications began to target large-scale, complex
