Electronic Products Word of the Week: Cybernetics
What is cybernetics?
BY LEN SCHIEFER, Chief Copy Editor
When you hear terms beginning with “cyber,” such as “cyber Monday,” you immediately think of computers. The term is actually short for “cybernetics,” a scientific principle defined in the mid 20th century by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), a professor at MIT. In his book Cybernetics, Wiener defined the term as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Cybernetics comes from the Greek meaning to “steer” or “navigate.”
The study of cybernetics is broad and far reaching, To quote Wikipedia, “Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s . . . . During the second half of the 20th century cybernetics evolved in ways that distinguish first-order cybernetics (about observed systems) from second-order cybernetics (about observing systems). More recently there is talk about a third-order cybernetics (doing in ways that embraces first and second-order).”
From Electronic Products Magazine, one example of a product using the principles of cybernetics is the Millennium multiaxis motion controller, a product chosen to be spotlighted here only because of its maker’s name. In 2000 that company was called Applied Cybernetics, but is now Liburdi; the URL www.appliedcybernetics.com/default.aspx is still in use. The controller “offers the feature set of Performance Motion Devices’ Navigator embedded motion processor to provide one-, two-, and four-axis control of servo and step motors.” Note the aspect of machine control, a common theme in many products covered in Electronic Products. Add to that all the articles you find on sensors and you can imagine how machine control can be related to animal (including human) control, and the bridge between the two that is robotics.
So while Cyber Monday is past, we have many Cyber Futures to look forward to. ■
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