Cars, washing machines and many other appliances that we use in our daily lives are becoming increasingly automated and computerized. This is also true for the factories that produce these products, where automation is increasingly employed. In fact, the cost advantages of factory automation have been a large factor in the availability of today's variety of high-quality, low-cost products on the market.

Meanwhile, the workers of Japan's "baby boom" generation, who were the driving force behind the post-war period of rapid economic growth, will begin retiring in 2007. This is becoming a matter of growing concern for the manufacturing industry. With the projected loss of technical experts, research is underway to determine if machines can perform much of the same work that was once totally dependent on the sensing faculties and intuitions of human experts.

If this is to happen, machines must be able to make judgments in the same way that people do. In other words, they must be able to extract high-value information from various phenomena and process the information intelligently. OMRON has been working on developing technologies with these capabilities since the early 1980s, beginning with its revolutionary fuzzy logic technology. Consistent refinement of this technology has eventually led to the development of what we now call Knowledge Information Control Technology.

Fuzzy logic is one of the most popular means of incorporating human knowledge and expertise into machines. Although the theory of fuzzy logic itself was available as far back as the 1960s, in Japan practical studies advanced rapidly around the mid-1980s. Since 1988, when OMRON began its research of Knowledge Information Control Technology, the company has been granted many patents related to fuzzy logic. Even today, OMRON holds the largest number of patents among Japanese manufacturers.