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A backhoe hooked up to a virtual reality input arm with force feedback was built several decades ago. The operator could feel obstructions, and dig out the dirt around a pipe by feel. Never became a product, though. Probably too early.
ETH Zurich[1, 2] is fairly famous as an engineering school. Somehow in my mind it is linked with computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra[3], but according to the Wiki he was never based there. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich [2] https://ethz.ch/en.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
Einstein, among others, studied there [1]
[1] https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/global/events/digitaler-ei...
Considering it scans all the rocks, you'd think it would be able to fit the rocks together better. I don't expect a Incan wall, but I think it would be able to construct a tighter fitting wall if it were programmed to care.
It could perhaps if it had all rocks available up front to scan and plan the entire wall with. But it retrieves one rock at a time and can only place on the top row somewhere. Given the geometries are random I wouldn’t expect it to reliably have tight fits given how it’s sampling and placing.
Considering it scans all the rocks, you'd think it would be able to fit the rocks together better. I don't expect a Incan wall, but I think it would be able to construct a tighter fitting wall if it were programmed to care.
It could perhaps if it had all rocks available up front to scan and plan the entire wall with. But it retrieves one rock at a time and can only place on the top row somewhere. Given the geometries are random I wouldn’t expect it to reliably have tight fits given how it’s sampling and placing.
Considering it scans all the rocks, you'd think it would be able to fit the rocks together better. I don't expect a Incan wall, but I think it would be able to construct a tighter fitting wall if it were programmed to care.
An Incan wall is much "easier" (airqoted qualifier). There's much effort required to square up stone and shape faces, a lot of drilling, wedges, and precision chisel finishing. However, once it comes to the stacking it's been reduced to a bricklaying exercise (already solved for robots and posted to HN). Traditional drywall evolved from field clearing, stacking rocks to get them out of the way and to reduce wind acro…
- A heavy machinery operator would no longer be needed, but wouldn’t you need 1 or more people to operate and manage the robot as well as verify the solution?
It’s a really cool direction for construction but I wonder what the net/net cost savings would really be in the near future anyway.
Nice. Heavy equipment with many degrees of freedom is hard for humans to control. Some operators are really good, but not all of them. A backhoe hooked up to a virtual reality input arm with force feedback was built several decades ago. The operator could feel obstructions, and dig out the dirt around a pipe by feel. Never became a product, though. Probably too early.
This seems like game changing technology. There are a heap of such walls around here, some built long ago by Dalmation immigrants (and some allegedly by German POWs). It's quite labour intensive and highly skilled to create them. We have some on our property, used to retain the hillside after land slips. They were built with an excavator by a gnarly old guy who was unbelievably skilled. One thing I wonder is whether…
Visiting Scotland, I was told that the apparent lack of stability is what keeps the sheep from pushing against the dry stone walls there. Apocryphal or true? No idea. It's intriguing to think that sheep have a sense for stable construction, and that people have learned to deceive it.