Slashdot Mirror
Small Robots Could Build Landing Site For Moon Base
A new NASA-sponsored study suggests that small lawnmower-sized robots could be used to build a landing site for a moon outpost. In order to be efficient a landing pad would have to be close to any structures created, but without an atmosphere to slow down the lunar sand it would sandblast the outpost, creating the need for some sort of protection. By using small robots to either build protective berms or collect rocks to "pave" a landing pad, NASA hopes to provide protection against the sand-blasting effects of a landing on the moon.
Now I know how I'm gonna win that sand castle contest this year...
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
If robots could be used in construction this complex, they already would. Right up here in Minnesota, there is a huge need for road repair and construction. If there was any way to automate the process more than it already is, it would be done by now. Any robot that could withstand the punishment of construction work would need to be very heavy, and also have a lot of redundancy built into it. It's one thing to make a little mini-rover with a camera and some sampling equipment. It's quite another to put a Caterpillar, cement truck, and support equipment up there, and expect it not to break. Sorry, but human beings need to be there... There are some things robots just can't do -- like repair themselves automatically. And I mean that in practical real-world terms, not in the laboratory.
Build it on Earth first and make it work, then we'll talk about the moon.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Why not use a crater wall? Put the landing strip on the outside, the base on the inside, and cut a tunnel? (And build a ramp over/around for the big stuff.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Just don't let the Chinese know where your moon base is going to be, they'll crash into it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7917957.stm
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
and someone wants to make berms of Moon rock and sand with robots. Convential explosives might be cheaper and certainly more entertaining. WOnder how much a space plow will cost?
It's all well and good until a some half iPod, half egg timer robot swoops in and steals all the plants out of your greenhouse.
-=Bang Bang=-
While I like the idea of manned exploration, I think sending in robots, or near autonomous robots first is a good idea. For tasks like this they have great advantages of more simple life sort. I envision a large roomba. PS. It was hard not to just post "Cylons were created by man . . ."
Think Deeply.
No weather on the moon. No thieves. No vandals. No vegetation. No mud. 1/6th gee. No wind to blow piles of dirt away. It's a simpler environment to work in.
Forget the construction work, could you build a rover that would last 90 days in Minnesota. just driving around photographing things?
Sheesh. How about a standard unit of measurement here, like Volkswagen Beetles or African male elephants or telephone directories? Tell me they at least expressed their hard drive size in multiples of Libraries of Congress.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
People are going to figure out you need nanorobotics for this type of stuff, and will stop f-ing around and build the damn things.
"...I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease." - Linus Torvalds
We can't even build these here on Earth yet, but when we can I assume stupid shit like moving dirt around should be trivial.
On just what the lunar soil is really like. We know a few bits from the various moon missions but its not like anyone tries to dig anything around up there. If the lunar soil was just a big pile of dust, then a robot pushing it around is rather doable. But if it had all sorts surprises in it, rocks, differences in composition that changes the way one digs, well then, the robots will run into problems.
This is my sig.
I would not want the landing pad right next to the outpost unless you have achieved the impossible with 100% error/malfunction free operation of the lander vehicle hardware and software, eliminate human error, and have assassinated Murphy.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
If there was any way to automate the process more than it already is, it would be done by now.
Do you have any concept of which you are speaking? Why on earth (lol) would you want to further automate road construction in Minnesota? Human labor on this planet is pretty cheap, even if it is unionized. When you have fly that labor to off word, hiring someone to scrub the great wall of china with a toothbrush is cheap in comparison.
Robots don't need air, food, or water. They can work for long periods of time in utterly hostile environments with little to no supervision. They don't get sick or bored. They can be mass produced. When you are done with them, they don't want to go home. And, they have yet to rise up and try to enslave humanity, which is more than we can say for humanity.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
With what we can learn solving this one, we can eliminate the need to send people for the rest of the mission. Meanwhile a robotics program gets funding under the guise a being a 'send people' program.
I like it. I think there's plenty of advantages running a mission remotely through robots versus remotely through the incredibly clumsy gloves of space suits. And boy if you want to talk about NASA funded research with a terrific 'trickledown' effect, solving the various robotics problems involved with this would be it. Good idea.
I think constructing berms and such is redundant. After a few typical NASA landing attempts, there should be a nice crater at the landing site with berms to protect the base.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
How many times have there been stories of creating robots to do the dirty work for humans? The Terminator, The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica are a few stories out there.
They say "Oh, we just need to do this on another planet and everything will be okay." Nevermind that the "this" is something we aren't even remotely approaching be able to accomplish right here in our own backyard.
Well, you know, when you're talking about slamming cruise-liner chunks of ice into a planet, I'll be the first to say "Not In My Back Yard".
Mouser Mecha-Catbot might have a shot at beating BioHazard.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Why doesn't NASA simply use a reverse graviton flux to land the spacecraft without any rocket blowing towards the lunar sand ? Oh wait... you guys haven't discovered yet how to create gravitons right ? Shit. I hope I haven't modified this timeline too much by revealing things you aren't supposed to know. Shitshitshit.
Many small vs. one large makes good sense in case of failure(s). Either way, why not blast the dust away as the preparation stage? A squadron of small crawlers with a high gas expansion motor (for simplicity, monopropellant such as UDMH, as in Shuttle steering thrusters or H2O2 as in Armadillo's landers) pointed ahead and slightly down. They'd line up side by side, crawl away from the base site, blasting the dust away in front of them like a line of snow blowers.
Yes, this design might require more mass to be sent to the moon initially due to the mass of reaction gas. However it leaves a bunch of functional crawlers for other tasks plus a bunch of functional motors that can be used to construct suborbital lifters.
If there's water ice, they could be constructed to harvest it, use the solar UV to convert it to H2O2, and be self-refilling. This would be slower because where there's ice there's less sunlight. Armadillo's designs would be very likely to be adaptable because they've built not only H2O2 lifter motors, but also H2O2 production facilities. A digger/UV/vacuum design is very different from their fuel production design (quite likely far more reliable), but they have some experience with the subject, and already have award money for designing landers.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
All I can say is "whooosh"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Who says they'll let us land there?!1! After all that work our base are belong to them.
Ave Molech Setting
First post, from a small robot, on the moon!
That small anonymous robot should be FIRED
from a CANNON
into the SUN!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
... it's a parking lot. Is there any option to move the lander off the landing pad to free up the space?
Fire the robots, hire monkeys instead. Simians have more brains and intelligence. Why spend more money developing complex machines when we have cheap apes around who will do the work for free?
nobody remains virgin, life fscks everyone...
Why robots? Because they can work at -40 temperatures, doing 16 hour shifts.
Except they can't, because apart from the fact that you're lucky to get 8 hours of sunshine in MN when it's -40 out, things like rain and snow and vandals and wind and mud and thieves that make your average human grumble in the pub after work bollix up robots completely.
Every mile of road we build takes a team of twenty people working at least a couple days.
You're building roads damn fast in MN.
The robots we're talking about only have to build 160 feet of dirt-pile. They don't even have to compact it. And they can take six months to do the job. And, again, they don't have to worry about wind and rain and green things with teeth and Mrs Cake.
Every mile of road we build takes a team of twenty people working at least a couple days. And it's crap work that nobody wants to do, and only a small subset of the population is physically capable OF doing -- which is why, regardless of how well it pays, there's going to remain a shortage.
/. post an article on Minnesota road construction, I would encourage you to repost it.
I think you are missing the point. I really don't care what you advocate as a solution for road construction in Minnesota.
The article is about robots building things on the moon. Your initial post suggested that humans would be a better choice, and you attempted to back your thesis with examples from Minnesota, which although they are both composed primarily of cheese, bear no resemblance to each other from logistical standpoints. Therefore, I would suggest that your thesis is flawed, and should be discounted.
However, your above post is quite informational, and should
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The article talks about two approaches: building protective berms, or paving with rocks large enough that they don't get blasted away.
This, being the first ever attempt at building such a facility, might be the time to try both approaches simultaneously?
Future settlements will still need radiation protection, which will still be the major environmental concern for future lunar inhabitants (Lunites?)
Anyone remember how deep the soil base would need to be? Obviously without any atmosphere and magnetic shield cosmic rays and other high powered radiation will still penetrate the soil shield.
..........FULL STOP.
This is great! That is until the alien AI, which has a prime directive requiring destruction of all biological infestations, tells the robots to build a mass driver with which it either bombards Earth with large chunks of rock or completely de-orbits the Moon.
Impossible. Minimum latency from the moon is ~2 seconds. No way someone could get FP with that much lag.
nobody is stopping private industry from competing. private industry is in fact beginning to catch up and will supplant NASA if it ever does. it has a ways to go yet.
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
Instead of just have robots construct the station, have them man it also. The savings from not having life support and safety systems would be tremendous. It would greatly reduce the cost of manned missions to almost that of unmanned missions!!! . . . . . oh, wait
Table-ized A.I.
This sounds alot like putting a whole bunch of Wall-e robots on the moon, and letting them stack-up a moon base. I hope NASA credits Pixar with this idea.
What's next Walm*rt creating a spin-off called Big-N-Large?
Yeh, the moon doesn't have all that water that has to be kept out of robot innards, it doesn't have those clouds hiding the sun from the solar collectors, it doesn't have those trees turning the nice smooth regolith into a fractal maze. Any sane robot would pick the moon over MN...
...Just finishing reading "Red Mars" and they talk about automated or programmable construction robots.
However I did notice that the author glossed over many of the problems associated with this, which the moonbots (if I may) would also encounter.
#1) Weight. Escaping earths gravity well is hard.
#2) HOT!/COLD! It is either really freakin' hot or really freakin' cold depending on where the Sun happens to be.
#3) Oxygen. None. Cannot combust stuff.
#4) Erosion. None. While having an atmosphere is a pain in the ass (I am lookin at you snow shovelin'!), it also makes stuff nice and roundy.
#5) Gravamity, not much. Good sometimes, but not all.
So here is my 2 cents.
1) Gravity well. Bottom line very expensive and there will be a limit as to size of items. The solution here is very small, very simple machines. The first robots should be more about material conversion, rather than construction. Basically Von Neuman machines, that eat Rigolith, and produce more of them metallic selves. Later would come the little robot eating machine, etc.. until you get to more complex robotic systems. In any event the whole point is the less trips the better, ideally, there should be only one. Realistically we don't have the technology or the automation, and won't for a long time.
2) Two problems here. First is many electronics that we currently use on earth don't like being really hot OR really cold, never mind alternating variations of the two. After a while they break down. Cure is new integrated technology we don't have using alternatives to silicon etc. The second problem is that everything runs on batteries. Guess what, most batteries, like electronics, either like Hot or Cold, but not both, and certainly not alternating. The solution now for both is to heat stuff, however this wears out, and also heat costs energy and efficiency. They used mythical "Hydrazine" Red Mars.
#3) No Oxy! Which means may need to bring, or discover other ways to "do stuff". Now no fossil fuels so engine being out not a big deal. However some simple things we do here would be impossible. Also some chemical reactions would not be possible unless we bring oxy as well. Some things in mining/excavating/construction that go boom, no go boom any more. Magic Hydrazine again.
#4) Another thing they pointed out in Red Mars, was "fines". Microscopic dust basically. This stuff would get everywhere, and in everything. This is bad enough, but to top it off, all these "fines" and all the dust as well would be jagged sharp little buggers. Breath deep friends! Any prolonged exposure would surly break down any equipment with moving parts.
#5) isn't so much a set back as an new way of thinking. 1/6 gravity mean you are going to have to do things different, from how you move earth (or moon I guess in this context), to how you go boom (and not have debris hanging around forever, and scattering everywhere), to leverage calculations (robot weighs X, can pick up Y)...
Anyway long story short we are a long way off. I think our best bet is in nanotechnology and creating very simple micro moonbots (had to) that are easily transportable, that would handle some simple conversion/microbot creation activities. The rest would follow and is a long way off I think.
Taking up a lawnmower sized robot, to play in the sandbox is likely a waste of time other than in PR.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Very good point: the difference between a teleoperated robot and a piece of construction equipment is whether you need to include a heated cab or a bunch of cameras.
"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"
And also George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest: "Because it is there."
In other words, we want to go there because we're human. It doesn't NEED a technical or scientific justification.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Yes, let's use robots to prepare the moon base site. And then we can use robots to build the habitats. And then we can use robots to collect the field samples -- after all, that's just more digging. And then we can use the robots we already use to analyze the samples. And then use more robots to manufacture and operate a moon mining operation... ... wait, why were we sending people again?
(I mean that as a serious question. Why bother with humans?)
with blackjack... and hookers....
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
There's no reason to lift the mass from one gravity well to another. The real challenge is to design a robotic device that can make useful stuff from Moon dust and rocks. You have lots of raw material and an abundance of sunshine to produce power. If you focus a large enough parabolic mirror at the dust you can melt it or at least sinter it into potentially useful parts. Make them precise enough and you can build a large device out of the parts. It gives new meaning to Stone Age Technology, "Fred Flintstone's Moon Buggy and Bulldozer Emporium!"
After you make the shapes, you need is to add a power source to make it move and assemble it. If you are impatient, you ship the power source from the earth to the moon. We need to think small and make it work. Then build bigger and bigger stuff there. Of course the next step will be to mine the moon for metal and other resources to make your stuff with.
We also need to adjust our sense of time. The devices don't need to operate at a rate of motion that appeals to the "short attention span" people of today. Design a mechanism that accomplishes the task by moving from place to place on nothing more than thermal expansion of the parts. Shade your crawler device with a movable sheet of Mylar mirror film to block the sun and the parts will shrink. Let the sun hit it and it expands. design it for this and you could make a zigzag shaped device that snakes across the surface without any power source (as we would define it) Don't think it will work? Those tar strips in the road are there for a reason. It's called thermal expansion, and it moves mountains on earth.
Just a Microwave unit that bakes say several feet of dirt into a harden unit should do the trick. Ideally, it would be on SLOW MOVING WHEELS, and have a lot of power available to it. That would allow it to slowly cook the ground underneath it. What would a unit like that weigh? Not that much. How about another scoop unit? Should not be that much. In the ideal situation, this is all put down on the moon about 3 years before our first landing. And it then builds up a pad, for landing on. As for here, on this planet, I suspect that we will see LOTS of growth in robotics over the next 4-8 years. We are about to see a resurgence of RD in America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How do you expect them to reroute auxiliary power thru the deflector dish when they haven't even got a deflector dish?
50 Wall-E's should be just what they need.
Small robots could build landing site for moon base, and monkeys could fly out of my butt. The odds of it actually happening are about the same.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Small robots?
Now all we need is a tall, golden, rather prissy robot that speaks 6 million languages and ...
I am anarch of all I survey.
Design a collection of robots out of simple standardized pieces made primarily of ceramics and metals derived from lunar regolith. Send a first set of robots that;
For now, we make the electronic brains, motors, and batteries on earth and we send them to the moon, because building robots sophisticated enough to build those items on the moon is probably beyond us. That still cuts down what we need to send to the moon by 99.99% (especially if any of your robots need to be big dirt or rock movers.)
You dig straight down into the lunar crust, far enough to protect people from Solar storms, meteor showers, medium sized impacts from space debris (i.e. several meters or less.) You reinforce the structure with your industrial grade aluminum and titanium building component. You build super thick glass skylights to bring light down into the facility for human habitats and agriculture. Your robot workforce numbering in the several hundred to several thousand machines is busy, building a habitable human town capable of housing several dozen researcher initially, but thousands to many thousand eventually. You have a prime bit of real estate. Direct access to a virtually perfect vacuum for industrial applications (foamed metals, near 100% yields for electronics manufacturing, the perfect place to develop nanotechnology...) Solar power out the wazoo! A tiny gravity well ensures this will be the local space port of choice. A perfect platform for telescopes of all types. Large uninhabited areas perfect for dropping medium sized asteroids on for mining their precious materials (C,H,O,N, Iron, Nickel, rare earth Metals, etc.) Sounds to me the the mother of all money making ventures!
I disagree. The amount of material you would have to ship to the moon to support an extended human visit would *far* exceed the cost to ship a small army of robots. And in the case of humans, you would still have to give them the tools to do the work.
Robots visited mars first for a reason, and they worked quite nicely. Manned space exploration is a romantic 20th century leftover. Until a whole slew of new technology is invented, robots are smaller, faster, cheaper, and safer.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Yeah, right.
I don't know what planet you're posting from but here on earth the contruction industry is one of the least rational businesses in the entire developed world. Jackhammers that have no maintenance cycle. Prescriptive building codes that forbid most of the effective techniques and materials. Union regs that split a one person job between six people working for three firms.
If you think that "if the construction industry hasn't done it, it must not be possible", then you are either stunningly ignorant or comprehensively naive. Or, most likely, both.
Oh, btw, if you think that I'm just trolling, even beyond my non-trivial personal experience in the field in states all across the country, I, as it happens, have sat down with staff at not only several major contractors and engineering firms but also the relevant experts at Engineering-News Record and several other industry journals to discuss exactly this subject. Productivity numbers in the whole industry are a joke compared to any other field you can name.
Seriously. Detonating a warhead should glass the whole surface in absence of atmosphere. By the time they actually do build a base radiation should dissipate.
Some of the Stanford AI crowd in the 1980s were talking up a proposal for a long-term project to build robots capable of building a moon base by the year 2000. I commented at the time "How soon can you do it in Arizona?" This yielded some embarrassment.
NASA robotics efforts have had an overall negative effect on robotics as a field. They take forever, they produce one-off devices, and they suck smart people out of useful areas. JPL's rovers are really rather simple-minded devices, and are mostly teleoperated. They're just well engineered. Robotics efforts out of the NASA "centers" have generally been embarrassing.
I would be scared the robots would have figured out they could overpower me.
...nobody is stopping private industry from competing.
Look here. Bet you'll find something.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Actually, you are wrong. You are probably thinking of the first manned moon landing. The first unmanned ones stretched back a good decade before the first manned one, with dozens of attempts by the US and USSR. We sent a whole slew of stuff to the moon before we even tried to put a man up.
Also, computers have advanced just a tad since 1969, so I think that comparison might be a little out of date. For specific tasks, computers can out think humans by orders of magnitude.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In a world where we can use robots remotely to perform surgery on patients around the world, I never understood why we couldn't perform less time critical operations such as building bases on the moon.
It seems to me that it should be possible to send several robots to the moon that could be remote controlled from earth and actually construct complex structures on the moon. The real problem of course would be the transportation of raw materials, but somehow I figure that since life support wouldn't be a huge issue, it should be possible to transport materials into space using the shuttle or a rocket and then send them to the moon using little more than guidance rockets. The rockets themselves can also be part of the raw materials once they're there.
I really hope China or India pull something like this off since they seem to be able to accomplish more with less politics than the western countries these past few decades.
I found nothing there that proves your point. every endeavor has regulations. how does pointing at the regulation in this area demonstrate your point? I am aware of private companies that are already doing the things which you say they cannot do.
both of these are private companies: http://www.scaled.com/ http://www.virgingalactic.com/
and then a list of 24 additional companies here on the left sidebar of this page: http://space.xprize.org/ansari-x-prize
In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. -T.S. Eliot
You are correct, sir/ma'am. In fact just the opposite appears to be true. It seems times have changed since NASA held an exclusive monopoly.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
I hope NASA is smart enough to build these robots to be multi pourpose and to be able to recover each other from turn overs and failures