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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, @05:48PM (3 children)
Maybe in your perception of reality. In my industry, first, it's a rare (less than 5%) startup that succeeds, as in staying solvent, more than 5 years. Of those successful ones, well over 99% are capitalized with more than $10M investment. The goal of basically all of them is to get bought by a big player with an exit price of 20x or better than their investment capital, because of the high failure rate investors aren't interested without the high multiple, short horizon buyout potential. In this environment, without $10M investment, smaller players can't hope to pass the regulatory hurdles.
So, no, it's not only trust fund babies who have $10M+ to invest in high risk endeavors, it's VCs and other consortia... none of them apparently interested in anything other than growing their outsized net-worth as quickly as possible.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:08PM (2 children)
Quite irrelevant to the quote you replied to.
Oh look, the same players who are going to rescue us with UBI are causing this major problem in your industry.
Their motives don't have to be pure. Again this is quite irrelevant to the topic of discussion.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:30PM (1 child)
You think these assholes pay significant amounts of income tax? These are gamblers, and they lose as much as they win. The losers pay zero, the winners defer their capital gains and end up paying greatly reduced rates by all sorts of methods, most of which they wrote into the tax code themselves and handed to their pet legislators to enact.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 24 2018, @06:38PM
Yes.
Then you don't understand that sort of investment.