fastcompany.com
Here's a teaser video we put together too, if you're curious to see some more shots of the system in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ2fP1Y5Z2E
We need high speed rail building robots, solar farm building robots, home building robots, healthcare robots. Cheap repairable open robots. Robots that defend us, robots that transport.
More robots than humans. More robot companies diverse in their approaches.
Do you not know of all the technology that we enjoy today that had movies and books decrying the dangers?
Like what?
https://macleans.ca/facebook-instant-articles/boo-a-brief-hi...
Btw I think social media is a very dangerous tool being abused and exploited by many.
Defend from who, and who is us ?
There's a country in Europe currently being invaded in a war of conquest because the invader can for the explicit purpose of subjugating the population and seizing territory and natural resources.
We support that Terror state too, Israel.
Sure selling your physical labor isn't ideal, but it's better than having no wage at all because there's nothing in your reach that isn't done by robots. We won't have a basic income, Americans can't even get a proper healthcare...
Accountants working with computers are more productive than accountants working with books and a hand-held calculator.
There will be a Pareto curve of distribution.
If we want to reduce the cost of things, we have to reduce the cost of inputs and make the markets transparent (while holding a base level of quality and safety).
This is why TVs and electronics become cheap while healthcare costs balloon out.
I assume that the current install process is fairly "human optimal". How much of that changes with your product to make it "automation" optimal? Were there small changes here for big wins? Or are you still using the same process with complex automation (the GM way), and do you see challenges arising from that?
One thing we're already doing that's different from human installers is the bay pre-assembly approach you can see in our demo video, where we build chunks of 5-9 modules on a tube and carry them out to the field. Ordinarily humans put up all of the tubes, then all of the brackets, then all of the modules. The pre-assembly approach allows us to do a bunch of work in a more controlled factory environment on a different part of the site.
Longer term there are other ideas we have, but since everything has to last for 30-40 years out in the field you have to be very strategic about making the big changes...
Originally "robot" was used only for humanoids, but the only essential capability that distinguishes robots from earlier machines are the manipulators, so in all other respects they may not resemble humans or animals nowadays.
(Although, Wikipedia is telling me dishwashers already existed at the time of the Jetsons, so my analogy is bad, and I should feel badly).
Humanoid robot has much more Jack of all trades potential.
Seems like you could fold them like an accordion into whatever max size can be carried by a forklift, drop them in place, pull them out to unfold, screw the whole prewired assembly down with ground screws, and plug it into the neighboring assembly?
This would probably work best with E/W racking, would go from tightly packed to corrugated.
I’m sure there are challenges I’m not considering, but with modules getting insanely cheap, it seems like racking/assembly/inverters are starting to dominate, and scaling up from single modules to full assemblies assembled in factories seems like a good next step.
(I’ve been building my own 20kw ground mount array, so I’ve had plenty of time to daydream about something we could’ve just dropped and pulled out)
A couple of ways this shows up: 1. making your system rugged to handle extreme weather. These sites need to last 30-40 years without breaking, which pushes you to use pretty heavy + large components. Piles get driven several feet into the ground, so even with unfolding systems you're still probably pile driving. 2. tracking -- adding the complexity to enable rows to rotate to face the sun makes it harder to make the system portable. Basically all large-scale solar getting built is single-axis tracked. 3. module cleaning -- it's important that vehicles can traverse rows to clean dirt off of modules on a regular basis. Having structure that connects the rows together may make this more difficult.
None of these are intractable on their own but together they make the approach you describe very difficult.
With panels getting so much cheaper, is tracking necessary still? Maybe if land is at a premium, but I know the aerocompact commercial deployments don’t support tracking.
Factory assembly and field deployment is a far faster, safer, and higher quality method of building solar farms.
Now that that’s taken care of, we just need some way to get the interconnection queues moving faster :-)
So ... tired ... of ... this.
This is NOT a shortage. This is lack of salary. The oil industry somehow manages just fine to get workers to really out of the way places.
Apparently the companies aren't drowning in enough projects to pay more money.
Why is that?
What's the most labor intensive part that remains when robots are putting the modules into place on racks? Attaching cables? I would guess that robots still aren't dexterous enough for that.
For traditional human installation, we're already approaching the limit of reasonable module sizes -- today's modules take two people to lift and align.
Perhaps the next size up would be the interior dimensions of a cargo container so they could slide in/out like sticks of gum.
Are there installers that actually use humans to lift solar panels onto racking on solar field projects? I figured everyone was using vacuum pump panel lifters instead of humans these days as it’s much faster and less prone to injury.
One example: https://unimove.com/lift/solar-panels/
These can easily be fabbed up by a single person, it’s just some steel and a couple vacuum pumps.
Ahh - better - here is one at scale from a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72UlzbsON4M
West Texas:
- 200 MW
- 1200 Acres
- Piles -- 68,350
- Support Piles (Crew does 80-100 piles/day)
- Tracker System
- 490,150 Solar Modules
- 540 watts/module
- Crew can install 500 panels a day
- These are multi person 2-4 people lifting.
- 500 workers on site - doing 6200 panels/day.
- (That suggests ~40 person crews if all worker installing
panels. Wow - now I see why this is a big deal)
- Cables panels -> Inverters
- Big Inverter install to to convert to AC
- Lots of concrete pouring for substation/Inverter Pad.Still cheaper than a metal roof intermediate layer, though. But in places like Germany overhead glass outside of some limited applications (notably greenhouses for farming) isn't allowed to drop on anyone's head just from a sharp pebble impacting and cracking a glass layer. Sadly the regulations are just as strict for a home carport/garage-without-door as for a majestic train station hall. So aside from the worse cooling it's in practice cheaper to just use a corrugated sheet metal layer to catch rain and falling glass, with the structural support for both unified.
If the new robot can install panels very quickly, but you need 3 weeks to flatten the field to unreasonable tolerances or install tons of dedicated framing and supports for it to function, your efficiency gains or cost saving numbers will take a hit.
Those considerations are unsexy and boring, they put a shade to the press release, yet are very important to assess the value of the innovation. I'll trust a company when they start being transparent about these aspects.
These folks built a robotic restaurant. It took the form of a food truck in a shipping container, and they put it in our little food truck area here. I then saw for the next 3 months, engineers frantically running around a semi operational thing, until they took it away because it didn't work.
The investors could have just invested in some food trucks, and made money.
Launch HN: Charge Robotics (YC S21) - Robots that build solar farms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30780455 - March 2022 (81 comments)
pretty cool.
source : have a solar engineering firm in Kenya, and have never had problems with panel installation labor (QA is another story).
It seemed like a pretty solid idea re: the QA part.
Now try to find ANYBODY willing to work out in the middle of the Mojave or Sonoran deserts. Espero que hables bien español.
On the domestic side we need go make rooftop solar more efficient to install for countries like the UK, there aren't enough people to do it there either.
Broadly, I think there's so much potential for computing in construction. If we can model logistics decisions as optimization decisions, we can leverage incredibly efficient solvers to extract efficiencies. The challenge, of course, being the "info pipeline" - integrating machines with construction processes and planning software and orchestrating it all in a way that adds value.
If an entire construction plan is modeled, you could also compile it into a staged procurement/shipment plan, and essentially orchestrate the supply chain in sync with the jobsite activities.
It'd be cool to have more info on how the process looks like with/without these machines, how rates of specific activities are impacted etc. but a bunch of this stuff is probably proprietary.
This really is the "lowest hanging fruit" of the construction industry.
Did the tolerances truly need to be so tight? Probably not, and just set so by a designer somewhere. But the panels do have to line up for tying into conduit that goes to (pad mounted) transformers and distribution equipment, etc.
What I meant was, for something like a building, the plan will describe the invariants of the design, but what it really reveals are all the available variants in achieving that outcome on the actual site. With a solar farm that available variance is actually very small because the overall "plant" has very little additional or emergent structure.
This is somewhat like AVX - it only works if you have large enough vectors (a simple operation that is repeated a million times on contiguous data). Arbitrary buildings are much harder to optimize.
One of his greatest quotes is ‘We already have 3d printers for buildings, they’re called cranes’.
His advice every time I send him one these articles usually rounds to: ‘If these smart@$$ %|~>heads would spend a couple of weeks on the job actually sweating and doing some real labor, they’d realize the problem isn’t lifting things, it’s organizing it.’
For one thing, he's already identified but failed to realise the problem: organising labour to be on site and ready to work is expensive and tricky.
But when there's less labour and more machines, you're now only paying opportunity cost, not direct costs of people turning up and being unable to complete the job because it's not ready to go yet.
And unlike people, the quantity of capable machinery can constantly increase and thus the cost per unit decrease.
Eventually the machine is cheap enough to leave on site even if something else delays it.
The robot presumably doesn’t need many breaks and can go all night. But any outage can’t have someone else sub in.