I wonder how many decades before someone hooks this up to a webcam and lets people play minecraft in real life.
As someone who works in insurance, I advise you not to wait
Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
171–180 of 190 posts
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robotics is expensive. One needs a team of software developer, electronics engineer and mechanical engineer to develop something. 3 people over 3 years with expensive hardware and couple millions $ for MVP needed. How many google ads for an app could one buy for this sum?
That is what public funded universities and research is for. Many claim projects like CERN is a waste of money but this is where many new ideas and tech comes from as a side effect of trying to solve problems that arise while trying to build a bigger and more powerful accelerator.
I have a problem with public funded universities and research in Germany. I really don’t like how professors own companies where everything comes from PhD students’ work. Basically they transfer state/grant money into personal pockets via paid work hours. Though I don’t know how this works in Switzerland. Another day I saw a long list of CERN technologies that I can license from them and they were not for free.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tensile strength will be a problem. Compression will be solved eventually, the tetris part also. But if there are to be tensile or twisting loads - there will be trouble.
Add steel/fiberglass tension rods and you can trade off compressive for tensile strength.
So... reinforced concrete.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#174Having 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…
> my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. A friend of mind had a hill in his yard, and hired a guy that knew the local seed mix to hydroseed it. It went well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroseeding Can't figure a good word would be for what your boss did. It's not quite pyroseeding...
Ballistic broadcasting?
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#175Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is more that you cannot at all guarantee a specific performance of the structure ahead of time, because you can't know what the properties of the local rocks will be before you are on site and have measured them all.
The interesting thing here is you can feasibly measure them all. Not ahead of time, but as you build.
Sure, but then it's somewhat up to luck precisely what properties you get. This variation might me manageable if you design enough redundancy into the design, but by necessity you will need more margins than if you used a more controlled material.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sex? :) (edit: no, that was not an offer, sorry)
It's the opposite really, because you're trying to get your rocks on, not off.
Since you mention it, let's discuss hardcore https://hintonswaste.co.uk/news/what-is-hardcore/ (SFW)
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the problem is more that you cannot at all guarantee a specific performance of the structure ahead of time, because you can't know what the properties of the local rocks will be before you are on site and have measured them all.
Doesn't that apply to wood too? Yet we use wood to build houses almost everywhere.
People rarely build entirely using found wood on site, at the very least each tree to be used gets selected before you bother felling it. But the overwhelmingly most common use of wood is in the form of processed product: using quality controlled lumber of standardised size.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are Civil Engineers here (I only studied it at Uni - I ended up in IT!) When you deploy a structure like a retaining wall you want to try and ensure that the materials you use will retain their properties as long as possible and if part of it fails, it should not case the whole structure to fail. Add additional design requirements as you like eg colour and texture but always think about function first or you wi…
Another quick tip: resist the urge to stack your stones long-ways parallel to the course of wall. Instead, put the longest dimension perpendicular to the wall. This makes it much harder for the wall to fall outward as it shifts.
Perhaps, and there are lots of different types of stone and how to stack them.
My garden walls are of blue lias which is a bit like slate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lias) it lends itself to flat 1-6" thick blocks that lay into quite neat horizontal rows whilst still being disjoint and allowing water to flow out. Weeds do grow in the cracks and the woody ones at least should be removed.
As you say a thicker wall will be more stable. Water and soil pressure will be most intense at the base, so make the base thicker and thin out as you move up. A slight deviation from vertical will allow for the soil expanding. For example my walls were rebuilt after a dry spell so a few degrees off vertical allows for the clay to absorb water and expand.
Re: Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. A friend of mind had a hill in his yard, and hired a guy that knew the local seed mix to hydroseed it. It went well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroseeding Can't figure a good word would be for what your boss did. It's not quite pyroseeding...
Ballistic broadcasting?
Nevermind, I change my answer to grapeshotting