Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?
- From: Rich Walker <rw shadow.org.uk>
- Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 19:04:01 +0000
Graham Seaman <graham seul.org> writes:
tOn 12 Dec 2003, Rich Walker wrote:
I come from a long background of looking at the long-term impact of
robotics. Two things appear quickly in that thinking:
1) General-purpose humanoid robots should be able to do most of the
things people do as jobs.
2) General-purpose production machinery can construct things in batch
sizes as small as 1 with gains in lifecycle efficiency using designs
from anywhere.
Can you enlarge on 2)? (links, references, explanation...) (also
explanation of the term 'lifecycle efficiency')
Briefly,
craft production tends to have better environmental impact than
large-batch production
consider a robotic work-cell that operates at the level of an artisan -
able to build anything that can be described to it starting with some
level of raw material - and able to adapt the design around variations
in material
such a work-cell can also be used for end-of-life disassembly into
components, permitting complete reuse and recycling, as well as
dismantling for test, maintenance and repair.
Hence reducing the need to discard worn-out equipment
There are already some guys at the Vienna University doing this with
e.g. mobile phones and other equipment.
So lifecycle efficiency is the efficiency of the process when you
include raw material usage, cost of preparing components. re-use and
recycling of parts, total operational life, and so on.
If you look through the Sixth Framework programme, at anything with the
phrase "Factory of the Future", you'll see the EU already has some
grasp of this concept.
The other part of it is that once a design produced by a craftsman has been
passed to a machine, it can be propagated to any comparable workcell,
permitting production to be done locally. Given some "interesting"
production scheduling software, it may be possible to pass the design to
machines of differing capability. Given some case-based reasoning tools,
the design can be adapted to different user needs ("I want it in blue
with little flowers on") and different materials ("Can the case be a
nice hardwood?")
I had the (hopefully mistaken!) idea that production that was efficient in
terms of not wasting materials (ie. one aspect of being not too bad for
the environment) necessarily involved large volumes of identical products
(identical including 'same thing with a different skin', or 'one of 6
permutations of the same set of parts' for the puproses of this sentence).
At present, that is mostly the case.
cheers, Rich
Thanks
Graham
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rich walker | Shadow Robot Company | rw shadow.org.uk
technical director 251 Liverpool Road |
need a Hand? London N1 1LX | +UK 20 7700 2487
www.shadow.org.uk/products/newhand.shtml
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http://www.oekonux.org/