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That's the thing though - your example of an oil-changing robot could be automated today - if we had standard placement of components. It's strange - our input

by cr0sh 10y ago

That's the thing though - your example of an oil-changing robot could be automated today - if we had standard placement of components. It's strange - our input controls are all pretty much the same from car to car. But everything else, from under the hood to elsewhere, is completely and randomly different - not just from car model to model, or manufacturer to manufacture, but even year to year on the same model of car from the same manufacturer! This frustrates mechanics and anyone who works on their own cars to no end. In short, if we wanted to solve these problems, we could solve them today, much like we solved the automation problems in manufacturing - by standardizing things, from sizes, to placement, to speeds and whatever else. We didn't try to replace people with robots that looked like people, but rather we designed machines to the task as hand, and made what they interacted with homogenous.

sbierwagen 10y ago
That's the thing though - your example of an oil-changing robot could be automated today - if we had standard placement of components. Business-wise this can be spun as a feature, not a bug. How many different engine configurations are there on the road today? (Ignoring exotic cars and anything older than, say, 1970) 1,000? 10,000? Brute forcible, with money. And once you have a database with the location of the sump plug and oil filter on all common cars, that's a moat a competitor would have to cross. Scan the VIN on the dashboard to figure out which car is which. Handling the sump plug would be easy. (Impact wrench to get it off, torque wrench to put it back on. If you're fancy, you can have some way to detect if the sump plug is beat up and give the customer the option to buy a new one. Some cars have a sump plug washer that you're supposed to replace every time, which would be tough) Replacing the oil filter would be harder. Sump plugs have to be at the bottom of the oil pan, because of gravity, which makes them easy to get at, but oil filters tend to be crammed up in the middle of the engine bay, with narrow clearances.

by cr0sh 10y ago

sbierwagen 10y ago

That's the thing though - your example of an oil-changing robot could be automated today - if we had standard placement of components. Business-wise this can be spun as a feature, not a bug. How many different engine configurations are there on the road today? (Ignoring exotic cars and anything older than, say, 1970) 1,000? 10,000? Brute forcible, with money. And once you have a database with the location of the sump plug and oil filter on all common cars, that's a moat a competitor would have to cross. Scan the VIN on the dashboard to figure out which car is which. Handling the sump plug would be easy. (Impact wrench to get it off, torque wrench to put it back on. If you're fancy, you can have some way to detect if the sump plug is beat up and give the customer the option to buy a new one. Some cars have a sump plug washer that you're supposed to replace every time, which would be tough) Replacing the oil filter would be harder. Sump plugs have to be at the bottom of the oil pan, because of gravity, which makes them easy to get at, but oil filters tend to be crammed up in the middle of the engine bay, with narrow clearances.