We don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time without human interaction. Our society has been moving towards a “bring down the initial purchase price by sacrificing reliability, expect people to buy another when it wears out” for a long time. Even if you do your best to find only parts that are the highest quality and expected to last a long time, you’re not going to be able to avoid planning to use many parts for 10x longer than anyone has ever used them before.
Aside from component reliability, this sounds very complicated. Do difficult and expensive to make, and then issues of system reliability.
Agreed, but I think it’d be a worthwhile project to work towards. I can think of some ways to make it simpler. Recognition of modules could be aided by rfid tags or just plain old barcodes embedded in the objects that have some information about what part a robot is looking at and its orientation relative to the barcode stamp or rfid chip. There could be lines painted on the floors or walls and barcodes visible for navigation around the facility.
I guess a really hard part would be maintaining the pyramid or structure or whatever housing everything. You’d have to choose between building something you hope will last a long time and leaving it be—like a big stone pyramid or even a cave. Or you could build it all modular like the rest of it—like a lattice work or robot hive kind of thing. I’m kind of thinking something like these would be useful for city building, too… there was an article in Discover a long while back that referred to a paper by klaus lackner and wendt about their idea for auxons, I think it was- machines that would turn a big chunk of the desert into solar paneling. http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569 <--- there. Their suggestion was to harvest raw materials from the desert topsoil using carbothermic separation. I’m thinking you could use something similar for recycling if everything else failed? I don’t know enough about the processes involved. I guess the idea has been a research area for a little bit—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator … well anyways. The redundancy of the elements involved could overcome some reliability issues. There doesn’t have to be a crucial part of the chain where if one piece breaks down everything is broken. Problems could at least be relegated to disasters affecting whole classes of objects breaking down at once, like if all the robots were smashed at the same time by vault-robbers.
I should say I agree that we don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time and that the expense is definitely high. I don’t know that component reliability is as important as being able to replace components efficiently with as little waste as possible. Energy demand is a big concern. Having a fully automated power plant of some kind is a big concern, although maybe solar wouldn’t be so bad. I know you’d still desire to store the heat energy, say, as molten saline, to get steady output, and that could cause big difficulties in the long term. Maybe steady output isn’t necessary though, just frequent enough and high enough output to keep things repaired before too many break down.
We don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time without human interaction. Our society has been moving towards a “bring down the initial purchase price by sacrificing reliability, expect people to buy another when it wears out” for a long time. Even if you do your best to find only parts that are the highest quality and expected to last a long time, you’re not going to be able to avoid planning to use many parts for 10x longer than anyone has ever used them before.
Aside from component reliability, this sounds very complicated. Do difficult and expensive to make, and then issues of system reliability.
Agreed, but I think it’d be a worthwhile project to work towards. I can think of some ways to make it simpler. Recognition of modules could be aided by rfid tags or just plain old barcodes embedded in the objects that have some information about what part a robot is looking at and its orientation relative to the barcode stamp or rfid chip. There could be lines painted on the floors or walls and barcodes visible for navigation around the facility. I guess a really hard part would be maintaining the pyramid or structure or whatever housing everything. You’d have to choose between building something you hope will last a long time and leaving it be—like a big stone pyramid or even a cave. Or you could build it all modular like the rest of it—like a lattice work or robot hive kind of thing. I’m kind of thinking something like these would be useful for city building, too… there was an article in Discover a long while back that referred to a paper by klaus lackner and wendt about their idea for auxons, I think it was- machines that would turn a big chunk of the desert into solar paneling. http://discovermagazine.com/1995/oct/robotbuildthysel569 <--- there. Their suggestion was to harvest raw materials from the desert topsoil using carbothermic separation. I’m thinking you could use something similar for recycling if everything else failed? I don’t know enough about the processes involved. I guess the idea has been a research area for a little bit—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator … well anyways. The redundancy of the elements involved could overcome some reliability issues. There doesn’t have to be a crucial part of the chain where if one piece breaks down everything is broken. Problems could at least be relegated to disasters affecting whole classes of objects breaking down at once, like if all the robots were smashed at the same time by vault-robbers.
I should say I agree that we don’t have much experience in building tech that will last a long time and that the expense is definitely high. I don’t know that component reliability is as important as being able to replace components efficiently with as little waste as possible. Energy demand is a big concern. Having a fully automated power plant of some kind is a big concern, although maybe solar wouldn’t be so bad. I know you’d still desire to store the heat energy, say, as molten saline, to get steady output, and that could cause big difficulties in the long term. Maybe steady output isn’t necessary though, just frequent enough and high enough output to keep things repaired before too many break down.