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.