schneiderism

This post is more about the fact that I need to get a life than anything else. Yes, it involves robots. Yes, it involves innovation in the building industry. And yes, it even has bricks. That’s about all it takes to get me excited these days.

Anyway, I found this story via Monocle, the new magazine put out by Tyler Brulee of Wallpaper fame. It is a good magazine, content rich and incredibly diverse in its coverage. I highly recommend checking it out. The story involves researchers at the Architecture and Digital Fabrication laboratory at ETH Zürich and their innovations in using robots for the laying of bricks. This is not bricklaying in the traditional sense, as these robots are tasked with laying the bricks in precise patterns that are actually not achievable by humans… patterns that are both stunningly beautiful and structurally supportive. Interestingly, I stumbled upon this video shortly after touring the robotic brickworks that I mentioned in an earlier post. There is definitely something here, and it relates to the stories last year about robot built homes in Japan (which I can’t locate… but will shortly). So, robots are making the bricks and robots are laying the bricks. Soon, I think, they will also be delivering the bricks. This is fascinating, and not least of all because it involves a building method largely unchanged for the last 250 years, and before that for the previous 1500 years. This bodes incredibly well for innovation (especially involving robots) in a number of other seemingly mundane and arcane fields. It is stories like this, that may go overlooked, that really make me think about our world twenty years from now.

Sensational headlines aside, I was excited to read that the European Space Agency’s Eurobot passed its weightless environments test. Now, it is that much closer to joining its human counterparts at the International Space Station to support astronauts by holding things, putting things away, getting things out, and holding things. Not too deep a talent set, there, but nonetheless valuable in a weightless environment. Eurobot has three arms about the size of a human being’s, but they are articulated in seven places to allow it to move and pivot in ways that we cannot, unless you are an adherent of bikram yoga or some such.

My question is, shouldn’t we have had robots doing cool things in space like thirty years ago? What happened? Somewhere along the line the various space agencies totally let down the science fiction infused dreams of anybody born between WWII and 1985. Penalties should be assessed.

More via New Scientist