ASET Code of Ethics

Here I am about 20 years after his death and out of work, and recounting all that he taught me as I watch builders in the area wacking wood together. I watch as workmanship has given way to cost constraints and more so to safety of the builder.

During my time taking Engineering I recall an instructor telling us, the eager young students that you automated tasks that:

1. Where a danger to the operator and others
2. Repetitive tasks that would potentially reduce quality or injure the operator
3. Tasks that it was hard to find employees for.

So here I look at construction and for the most part other than the advent of air tools the various parts to building a house has been unchanged since the very first house was built. A carpenter still carries a hammer, still struggles with heights, cold, dust and the hazards associated with them. Mind you now a carpenter might only build on portion of a house rather than the whole house. But still with the injuries associated with the blunt trauma of hammering or the inhalation of dust that never break down. The occupation is still very hazardous and not much has been done in the industry to automate things in order to assist the carpenter.

Say for example you built a system that poured concrete much like how curbing is poured on a street. But instead of having a crew of guys come in and assemble forms to the basement specifications, then have concrete guys come in and pour those forms full. Why not have a combined system that used a bit more advanced concrete that would form and fill at the same time, much the way tunnels are made with shot-crete or how slip forms are used in making Dams and Bridges. The big benefit of this is only one crew arrives, pours and there is no forms if the concrete is stiff enough and bound with enough fillers to hold it’s shape. Also, you wouldn’t have voids like in the instance of the house next door. And you could be entirely more creative in what you built for your foundation. Even your footing could be slip poured with a curb laying device attached to the concrete pump. Lay out your drainage tile, and pour right over top of them with the curb former.

There are so many things that could be done to automate home building, assure exceptional quality and reduce injury. But I have yet to locate anyone willing to entertain my ideas and step forward to make them happen.

I was researching the current kinds of mowers found in the marketplace and I stumbled across a very informative Magazine on robotics.

Some day soon

Through out my career I have worked for a number of companies that manufactured component parts used within housing construction. I have worked within a variety of roles for these organizations and in dealing with the contractors that used these components I have managed to formulate a need that should be looked at in terms of automating. When a house is scheduled for construction the contractor lines up various sub trades to complete these parts and hopefully complete the house on time and under budget. But as money becomes a factor certain roles are harder and harder to locate sub contractors for. Some of the roles i know of personally are:

• Insulating after the initially rough in
• Painting
• applying flooring/screwing down flooring
• Landscaping
• Concrete work

So within the world of automation and manufacturing you always try to automate tasks that are hard to employee people to do, that are repetitive, or that are hazardous. And thus i think that automation and robotics should be tasked into these areas to eliminate them as it is increasingly hard to find employees to do them for a reasonable wage.

So my idea would be to build a robotic system that would insulate using spray in insulation, to be escorted into a house, be feed foam in installation and have it map each room, foam the wall cavities full and move to the next room. This would allow a handler to just have basic knowledge and to move the unit from site to site. All the intelligence would be built into the robotic system. This is should be entirly possible considering industrial manufacturing robotic systems have been doing this for years. This system could be just a smaller robotic arm system with a mapping system.

In terms of landscaping I believe that the scrapper or caterpillar could tirelessly move materials all day and night, having mapping systems and GPS location the system could be completely integrated into a entirely new power unit. Not having an operators cab the scrappers/caterpillars could be built to take advantage of torque and blade placement to pull the most from the vehicle. essentially the robotic system would be like a larger Roomba that would have a map encoded in it’s software that it would have to culture to a specific level. This posses some incredible benefits as it could work without restrictions of sight and fatigue, things that greatly inflate the costs of roads, landscaping, and construction these days.

I had read recently, that in Fort MacMurry they where working on robotizing mining trucks to be able to tirelessly haul oil sand from the pit to the watering centrifuge and clean sand back to the pit. Apparently, the hauling of these materials and the long hours of mundane, repetitive tasks result in a great many accidents along the pit roads and highways. i had read that they have had to encourage the drivers to drive on the left hand side of the road just encase the trucks collide so that the operators would not be kills with the shear mass of the operators cabs hitting.

The way of the future

For a while now I have been doodling on an idea about building a automated mower. I know there are various iterations of mowers already on the market that will mow within a pre-defined circuit. But with the success of robotic vacuums it dawned on me that it would be possible to produce a mower that could plot it’s own path based on GPS mapping of the field or area it was to mow.

So I have been working on the mechanics and matrix that a mower wold have to have in order to handle an unfamiliar terrain and be able to down load a map of an area.