Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
for the inventor would be to have all the benefits of the product at zero
cost, but that can never be achieved. A more realistic goal of inven-
tors is therefore that successive versions of a technical design improve its
ideality.
After he was released from the gulag, Altshuller continued for 20 years
to develop his theories with the assistance of more than 80 engineers and
scientists who helped him in the study of more than 1,500,000 patent
documents.
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In 1976 the Minsk School of TRIZ was started by Valerei
Tsourikov at the Radio Electronic University. Tsourikov was a disciple of
Altshuller's, and rapidly rose to become head of the Intelligent Systems
Laboratory at Minsk University. In 1987 he started a project called the
InventionMachine, based on TRIZ, which he took to the U.S.A. in 1991
and commercialised by setting up the Invention Machine Corporation,
which numbers IBM, General Electric and Motorola among its 500 or
more clients.
Not surprisingly, the Invention Machine
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is itself the subject of a
patent in the U.S.A.,
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granted in May 1999. The title of the patent,
“Computer based system for displaying in full motion linked concept
components for producing selected technical results”, belies the beauty
of the idea and the simplicity of the technology behind it. The Inven-
tion Machine assists the user in solving technical and engineering prob-
lems, and helps engineers, scientists and inventors to better understand
the products, processes, or machines they are attempting to invent and
improve—a methodology known as concept engineering. Such systems
serve not only to increase a designer's inventive and creative abilities in
solving problems in engineering and science, but also, in the course of
solving them, to induce inventors to consider new structural and func-
tional concepts that are applicable to their design goals.
The Invention Machine comprises knowledge-based and logic-based
systems that generate concepts and recommendations for solving prob-
lems at a conceptual level. More than 150 inventive rules and procedures
are included in the system's knowledge base, and when the user describes
the problem that needs to be solved, the system selects certain rules and
presents them to the user for consideration as possible routes to a solu-
tion. What the system is really doing is employing the TRIZ approach
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The number of published patents in the U.S.S.R. had grown significantly since Altshuller had
first planned the project in the late 1940s.
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The Invention Machine is a trademark of the Invention Machine Corporation, Inc.
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U.S. patent number 5,901,068.
