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from the building-a-more-robotic-tomorrow dept.
Hadrian is not the first large-scale industrial robot that can complete a whole build from start to finish. It's not even the first outdoor construction robot.
What's remarkable is it's both. As Mike told me, "Anything you can build inside a factory ... we're getting really, really good at. Trouble is, nothing's happening outdoors."
That's because environmental factors like wind and temperature variations can make life difficult for robots outdoors.
Most robots can't adjust to small, quick changes in wind or temperature fast enough to keep up.
That's fine if little wobbles won't make a big difference. But when you're working on something as large-scale as building a house and a light breeze could lead to bricks being laid way out of position, it can get very dangerous.
So up till now, any robot building on such large scales had to be indoors in minutely controlled environments.
Hadrian has overcome this problem using the precision technology Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). DST was developed in Perth by Mike's cousin, Mark Pivac, back in the early 2000s. The computer program measures environmental factors an astounding 2000 times per second, then accounts for them in real time.
If robots replace the construction workers, who then will wolf whistle?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:44AM
Roll back global human population to ~1B and I don't think the above would be a problem at all, hydro and solar powered (and nuclear where other clean sources aren't practical), plenty of wild caught fish and even free range beef, hardwoods to build the houses from - the Earth has a pretty bitchin' set of resources, for a certain number of people.
If that's what you're into, sure. Myself, with my nuclear family of 4, I'd like about 2500 square feet of living space, plus another 1000 of weather protected workshop, plus covered parking for the vehicles, too many vehicles to be considered efficient (small cars, big car, truck, boat, bicycles), but why does life have to be about efficiency? Maybe when I'm older, and even more physically broken, a high density low maintenance living arrangement might be attractive.
To me: human population has historically NEVER stopped growing, and I don't need another khallow-math lecture about how it's not really growing anymore, I don't believe anybody's crystal ball... it's still growing, 1 child in China still saw significant growth, maybe some really f-ed up economies like 1990s Russia actually reversed for a short while - do we want to all be like that? If we continue to have biological bodies, at some point whether 10B, 20B, or 200B - the Earth's population is going to have to stop growing, there just won't be enough solar power intersecting the planet to form the chemical bonds necessary to feed us all. So, to me the question is: what population number do you want to stop at? Personally, 2B seems nice to me, but that's just a swag, and can vary a lot depending on how those 2B people live. Incase somebody hasn't seen it yet, here's a plug for some other people who also think we need to conserve more of the Earth's resources than we currently are, a LOT more: The Half-Earth Project [half-earthproject.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]