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Great fun, but I suspect NIMBY concerns would kill any practical application. Let's imagine they get the machines scaled to the point when they could build an

Great fun, but I suspect NIMBY concerns would kill any practical application. Let's imagine they get the machines scaled to the point when they could build an actual habitable structure, and that they sort the power concerns that I suspect would make it insurmountably uneconomic. Now, imagine a squad of sufficiently large and powerful helicopters buzzing away all day next to your office. How many people are going to be OK with that?

philwelch 16y ago
Drones don't have lives, families, or seasonal affective disorder. There's no reason they can't work at night if it's less bothersome.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  Oh, you'd rather have a helicopter next door while you slept?
  - philwelch 16y ago
    If it was next to my apartment building I'd want the drones to work during the day and if it was next to my office I'd want the drones to work at night. Most homes are not right next to office buildings. I wouldn't mind if the drones were a couple blocks away though.
    - eftpotrm 16y ago
      I live next to a small industrial estate, my employers's campus location has houses the other side of the road and behind some trees from memory. Offices often have bars and restaurants around them which do good trade in the evening, sometimes city centre apartments mixed in too. I certainly follow the principle but I think there's less urban clear 'this time is OK' areas than you might think, low enough to further penalise this against traditional construction techniques.
      - philwelch 16y ago
        Not all techniques are appropriate for everything. (General rule.)
        eftpotrm 16y ago
        Agreed, I'm just saying that between noise, safety and simple powering concerns, I think the window for this being superior to current methods is very, very small.
pg 16y ago
Why couldn't small drones build things out of small elements? A lot of our assumptions about what is a reasonable unit of work are based on examples with humans in the loop. It might make more sense to think of a fleet of these things as a form of 3D printer.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving things the size of bricks rather than I beams, do you want to see what happens when two hovering robots each carrying a brick 5 metres off the ground bump into each other and suddenly stop hovering? Or if they start creating turbulence for each other and interfere with flight even without contact? Even if it doesn't get regulated by law the insurance implications would force de facto regulation. Lots of small components means more joints. With a brick as our example that's fine but I'm not convinced the gain over a squad of fairly cheap bricklayers is there - with a girder frame structure as is more typical for large commercial premises that means for the same design it's simultaneously weaker, heavier and more expensive. Not a trio of attributes I'd want to apply to my structure. This is a sort of technology I love, that's clearly very interesting and with all sorts of potential. But I don't see construction as the ideal target market for it, by a long way. Freight unloading would have been a great case had it not gone containerised some years ago. Warehouse order picking as with Amazon et al? Perhaps. You can have the storage floor as a controlled space without people underneath which reduces the safety issues and there wouldn't be the same problem with noise nuisance. If we wanted to go down that road though I'm not sure it's a big enough win over cranes / arms and conveyor belts, or that either is a win over fairly cheap people pushing trolleys (having worked alongside exactly that in the past). If we want to stick with construction it would make good sense for use in hazardous environments because it would provide a way of deploying a large, highly mobile force to an area where you couldn't deploy human labour (or where that deployment becomes severely impractical / unattractive for whatever reason - see the film 'Moon' for example), but I'm not sure that's a large enough market to justify the expense of developing the tech enough to make it fully usable. There doesn't seem to currently be a shortage of labour prepared to go and work in Siberian gold mines or northern Canadian tar sands quarries, for the right price, and I can't see the power technology for these devices scaling to the point to make them likely cheaper any time soon to invest in it. Cool tech searching for a better application IMHO. I'd love to see that better application though and would be heading down there to watch when it happened.
jpitz 16y ago
So, human workers and ordinary, loud construction equipment buzzing away all day for 2 years is ok, but robot equipment - quite capable of working 24/7 and likely capable of going faster - buzzing away for 8 months, thats unacceptable? I think unions are gonna scream louder than any NIMBY concerns.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  24/7 robots are fine, but helicopters are _loud_, particularly those with the lifting power to do construction work. We're currently seeing small proof-of-concept machines lifting small, light parts, but the machines needed to lift useful construction parts will need to be many times larger and heavier, and if they're going to run for any serious amount of time (as would be needed to be useful) then they either need very much bigger batteries or large fuel tanks, which again means extra weight which means more power, more noise and more energy to lift the extra weight of the energy. It's not impossible but it's a vicious, not virtuous, circle. I relatively regularly have the local police helicopter overhead and it's definitely loud enough to keep people awake, sometimes to wake you up in the first place. A whole fleet of these withing 1/4 mile of you will be loud, noticeably louder than a usual construction crew, and I'm still concerned about the neighbours complaining about the risk of this fleet of robot helicopters crashing into each other or dropping parts. Really, I think this is a very cool tech but a mad application of it that I really can't ever see working.

philwelch 16y ago

Drones don't have lives, families, or seasonal affective disorder. There's no reason they can't work at night if it's less bothersome.

eftpotrm 16y ago
Oh, you'd rather have a helicopter next door while you slept?
- philwelch 16y ago
  If it was next to my apartment building I'd want the drones to work during the day and if it was next to my office I'd want the drones to work at night. Most homes are not right next to office buildings. I wouldn't mind if the drones were a couple blocks away though.
  - eftpotrm 16y ago
    I live next to a small industrial estate, my employers's campus location has houses the other side of the road and behind some trees from memory. Offices often have bars and restaurants around them which do good trade in the evening, sometimes city centre apartments mixed in too. I certainly follow the principle but I think there's less urban clear 'this time is OK' areas than you might think, low enough to further penalise this against traditional construction techniques.
    - philwelch 16y ago
      Not all techniques are appropriate for everything. (General rule.)
      - eftpotrm 16y ago
        Agreed, I'm just saying that between noise, safety and simple powering concerns, I think the window for this being superior to current methods is very, very small.

pg 16y ago

Why couldn't small drones build things out of small elements? A lot of our assumptions about what is a reasonable unit of work are based on examples with humans in the loop. It might make more sense to think of a fleet of these things as a form of 3D printer.

eftpotrm 16y ago
Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving things the size of bricks rather than I beams, do you want to see what happens when two hovering robots each carrying a brick 5 metres off the ground bump into each other and suddenly stop hovering? Or if they start creating turbulence for each other and interfere with flight even without contact? Even if it doesn't get regulated by law the insurance implications would force de facto regulation. Lots of small components means more joints. With a brick as our example that's fine but I'm not convinced the gain over a squad of fairly cheap bricklayers is there - with a girder frame structure as is more typical for large commercial premises that means for the same design it's simultaneously weaker, heavier and more expensive. Not a trio of attributes I'd want to apply to my structure. This is a sort of technology I love, that's clearly very interesting and with all sorts of potential. But I don't see construction as the ideal target market for it, by a long way. Freight unloading would have been a great case had it not gone containerised some years ago. Warehouse order picking as with Amazon et al? Perhaps. You can have the storage floor as a controlled space without people underneath which reduces the safety issues and there wouldn't be the same problem with noise nuisance. If we wanted to go down that road though I'm not sure it's a big enough win over cranes / arms and conveyor belts, or that either is a win over fairly cheap people pushing trolleys (having worked alongside exactly that in the past). If we want to stick with construction it would make good sense for use in hazardous environments because it would provide a way of deploying a large, highly mobile force to an area where you couldn't deploy human labour (or where that deployment becomes severely impractical / unattractive for whatever reason - see the film 'Moon' for example), but I'm not sure that's a large enough market to justify the expense of developing the tech enough to make it fully usable. There doesn't seem to currently be a shortage of labour prepared to go and work in Siberian gold mines or northern Canadian tar sands quarries, for the right price, and I can't see the power technology for these devices scaling to the point to make them likely cheaper any time soon to invest in it. Cool tech searching for a better application IMHO. I'd love to see that better application though and would be heading down there to watch when it happened.

jpitz 16y ago

So, human workers and ordinary, loud construction equipment buzzing away all day for 2 years is ok, but robot equipment - quite capable of working 24/7 and likely capable of going faster - buzzing away for 8 months, thats unacceptable? I think unions are gonna scream louder than any NIMBY concerns.

eftpotrm 16y ago
24/7 robots are fine, but helicopters are _loud_, particularly those with the lifting power to do construction work. We're currently seeing small proof-of-concept machines lifting small, light parts, but the machines needed to lift useful construction parts will need to be many times larger and heavier, and if they're going to run for any serious amount of time (as would be needed to be useful) then they either need very much bigger batteries or large fuel tanks, which again means extra weight which means more power, more noise and more energy to lift the extra weight of the energy. It's not impossible but it's a vicious, not virtuous, circle. I relatively regularly have the local police helicopter overhead and it's definitely loud enough to keep people awake, sometimes to wake you up in the first place. A whole fleet of these withing 1/4 mile of you will be loud, noticeably louder than a usual construction crew, and I'm still concerned about the neighbours complaining about the risk of this fleet of robot helicopters crashing into each other or dropping parts. Really, I think this is a very cool tech but a mad application of it that I really can't ever see working.