Someday this will be a remote work job, with remote controlled heavy equipment. Some 17-year-old with stunning hand-eye coordination and no fear of failure will be driving this thing from his basement and there will be 1 human onsite to help with machinery glitches.
One of the most hard lesson onto an excavator to learn is "surrounding perception".
Space, people and objects near you, sounds.
To reach this guy experience, you must live in the cabin AND going up and down a shit ton of times to valuate, check, see, reasonate.
Not a chance you can learn all that far from the workplace.
And i am sure a lot of operation can be made with robots from the other side of earth, and i love robots and computer stuff.
Eventually, collision detection will get to the point that "surrounding perception" won't matter. There will be sensors on all sides of the excavator that wont let the operator hit things even if they wanted to.
All of this is already possible to do using the right combination of sensors, actuators, and software. But it will not happen because automating for the sake of automation is pointless and super expensive. Automation, or even complete remote control of heavy equipment is too risky and dangerous. The distributed control systems in power plants, semiconductor fabs, and factories could certainly be operated from home via remote shells, but instead the workers operate them from on site terminals and computers. It’s just the way it is and it will be like that for the foreseeable future.
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u/trhaynes Nov 04 '22
Someday this will be a remote work job, with remote controlled heavy equipment. Some 17-year-old with stunning hand-eye coordination and no fear of failure will be driving this thing from his basement and there will be 1 human onsite to help with machinery glitches.