Similarly, envision a solar sintering bot operating in the desert
Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
81–90 of 190 posts
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#82Having made a few dry stone walls I can attest to the merit of this achievement. Judging where rocks are to be placed, and in what orientation is a zen art. Anecdotally... I once tried to get wild flowers to grow on a stone wall. Every year we would seed the wall, only for the seeds to fall out or be eaten by birds. On inspiration, my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. Perf…
Now this is gardening I can get behind
Well please don’t stand in front of it…
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
They had no problem escaping through them in Clarkson's Farm.
I really enjoyed that show, but I have no confidence that production assistants weren't gallavanting about at night acting as gremlins. Clarkson is first and foremost an entertainer, and I'm sure he'd agree with that assessment.
Clarkson is the sort of guy who would have both friend and foe knocking over his walls just to mess with him.
Nonetheless, sheep farming can be incredibly difficult, and sheep love to assert just enough independence to be annoying.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am not convinced you are what you claim. Knowing where to look without colleagues or steeping in the field is difficult. When teaching people to code, I often run into the same issue: assuming people are good at googling, or know what Stack Overflow is.
I am very good at googling and other online resource discovery, but that is no replacement for a knowledgable practitioner pointing you towards known good, high quality online resources. You don’t know what you don’t know. "Unknown unknowns." I will even pay subject matter experts when necessary to bootstrap the research and autodidact process. There is no speed limit when learning, but rails and direction have value…
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or in this case, an ounce of experience is worth a pound of research.
Also: Wisdom. It is the difference between knowledge and experience. -Data, Star Trek
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#85Having made a few dry stone walls I can attest to the merit of this achievement. Judging where rocks are to be placed, and in what orientation is a zen art. Anecdotally... I once tried to get wild flowers to grow on a stone wall. Every year we would seed the wall, only for the seeds to fall out or be eaten by birds. On inspiration, my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. Perf…
I'm surprised the seeds would survive the heat and pressure of a shotgun cartridge blast that contained enough gun powder to embed them in a wall
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#86Having made a few dry stone walls I can attest to the merit of this achievement. Judging where rocks are to be placed, and in what orientation is a zen art. Anecdotally... I once tried to get wild flowers to grow on a stone wall. Every year we would seed the wall, only for the seeds to fall out or be eaten by birds. On inspiration, my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. Perf…
Not only is this a technical marvel, but it has potential construction physics implications. In simple terms, currently we expend energy to fragment rock, and then we expend additional energy (as concrete) to glue it back together. We do all this to re-arrange rocks into a shape (and strength) we want, and most importantly to do it cheap . Suddenly, an alternative just got a lot cheaper. Clearly this isn't fully bake…
The problem with dry stone construction is that you cannot determine the performance characteristics required for, say, a building foundation. Not all boulders are created equal, but a professional concrete pour, mixed and installed to the manufacturer’s specification is going to have a guaranteed maximum strength- something random boulders will not have.
What we can do is create our own concrete mix using Portland cement (the “glue”) and locally sourced materials to bulk it up such as gravel, aggregates, sand, etc.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only is this a technical marvel, but it has potential construction physics implications. In simple terms, currently we expend energy to fragment rock, and then we expend additional energy (as concrete) to glue it back together. We do all this to re-arrange rocks into a shape (and strength) we want, and most importantly to do it cheap . Suddenly, an alternative just got a lot cheaper. Clearly this isn't fully bake…
The problem with dry stone construction is that you cannot determine the performance characteristics required for, say, a building foundation. Not all boulders are created equal, but a professional concrete pour, mixed and installed to the manufacturer’s specification is going to have a guaranteed maximum strength- something random boulders will not have. What we can do is create our own concrete mix using Portland c…
So the question becomes, how do existing concrete manufacturers determine whether locally sourced materials ("random rocks") are suitable?
In traditional dry stone construction, strength of each rock is determined by sound and by sight. It seems crazy, but nowadays this should be feasible with a neural net. If you want to get fancy (or achieve high reliability) add ultrasound in the grippers or other sensor modalities.
Or... you target a market other than building foundations? :) I suspect different groups could pursue both paths.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#88I wish there were more companies in the US that can look at problem and solve it to a great deal of technical complexity. It seems like we’re too focused on large and shiny objects.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#89Nice. 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.
Do operators currently need to manually control every movement of the arm? I always assumed that such heavy equipment uses inverse kinematics to help the operator.
There's no IK because sometimes the operator needs to be very specific about where the "elbow" or "shoulder" ends up, to avoid hitting some other object. So they have manual control over everything.
If you're going to automate the kinematics, then you either need a manual override mode (which the operators will be unskilled with since it's seldom-used), or you need sensors and rules for the machine to know where it's not supposed to be (clearances around wires, other structures, etc) and that needs to be better than human operators currently do.
Those are theoretically possible, sure, but a valve-per-cylinder is really stinkin' reliable.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#90With this type of advancement, we may finally be ready to tackle the biggest challenge for domestic robots since domestic robot were envisioned: ironing and folding clothes.
You have forgotten the first task of the day: buttering fresh toast.