Professor Tomaso Poggio works with eyes. He does not treat them; he makes them--from scratch.

Poggio and his student proteges at MIT's artificial intelligence (A.I.) lab are in the process of building a machine which may someday be able to perform all the functions of a human eye: detecting the position, motion, shape and texture of almost any object.

Artificial "eyes" have been built before. "The most successful have only been able to deal with a constrained world: blocks and cubes painted a uniform color under controlled lighting," says Poggio. When complete, Poggio's invention will be able to recognize a human face.

Poggio's project is part of a decade-long effort at MIT to develop computers or robotic devices which can duplicate all the major capabilities of the human body, including sight, hearing and speech comprehension, touch, manipulative ability, locomotion, and reasoning power.

MIT, along with Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon, is at the forefront of artificial intelligence research, scientists there claim.

About 15 faculty, 85 students, and 60 staff members work at the lab. They research in small groups, each typically composed of a single faculty supervisor and several students and technicians. Each group devotes itself to mimicking a particular bodily function.

A researcher's typical "workday" consists mostly of writing programs, attending seminars, and just sitting and thinking about knotty problems, says Professor Carl E. Hewitt, a scientist at the lab. Hewitt says scientists at the lab spend surprisingly little time doing "lab work." "The lab is the computer," says Poggio.

Competition for the student research posts is intense; last year only 10 students were selected from a pool of 300 applicants. The great majority of student researchers are from MIT, but one, Oren W. Etzioni '86, is a Harvard undergraduate.

MIT graduate students work with Dr. John M. Hollerbach on perfecting a four-fingered robot hand, which he invented several years ago in collaboration with the University of Utah. "It was a 'joint' project," he quips.

In duplicating the human hand, Hollerbach says, all the myriad capabilities of flesh must be reproduced. Not only the ability to grasp, but also the ability to sense mass, configuration, texture, curvature, and temperature of various objects must be instilled in the machine. Hollerbach says that, if successful, his invention will be able to do all these and more, and will, in addition, have the same degree of mobility as a real hand

When perfected, the hand will be connected to--what else--a robotic arm, and this is where Professor Tomas Lozano-Perez and his fellow researchers come in.

Lozano-Perez has come up with an algorithm which allows a robot arm to carry out a pre-programmed series of tasks while avoiding obstacles which are placed in its way. He now is trying to come up with methods by which robots can "fiddle" with machine parts in order to make them fit.

Currently, says Lozano-Perez, industrial robots are no more than sophisticated "tape recorders." They are programmed by experts who lead their mechanical arms through, the motions of a particular task. The robots store this sequence of movements in their memories and can later repeat it an unlimited number of times.

Although such blind repetition may be sufficient for commercial applications, says Lozano-Perez, it does not exploit the full potential of the robot. He hopes to construct robots that need only general instructions, instead of the highly specified directions that present-day robots require. His creations would then by themselves identify needed parts, convey them to pre-ordained locations, and work them around--as a human might--until they fit properly.

The crowing glory of a successful imitation of the human body would certainly be duplication of the thought processes of the human brain. Professor Carl E. Hewitt is exploring possibilities in this area.