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Manned exploration - fine, I'm not challenging that.
But suppose we send robots to get things set up, do exploration and experiments under semi-direct remote control.
How big would the rocket need to be, to deliver maybe one metric ton of equipment and robot(s) to the moon?
How much will the lander have to mass (doesn't need to lift off again, unlike manned lander).
How much will such a mission cost?
I'd like to see robots get built quick and delivered over the next few years, while we get ready to return people to the moon. Don't worry about making them perfect or as light as possible - overbuild them as much as possible - give them just enough intelligence to stay alive and seek out radio contact if they get out of direct control.
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We've been sending robots to do work for us for years. We currently have two of them on mars doing a fantastic job taking pictures.
That is about the extent of our robot technology. We are not going to have a Commander Data for 1,000 years.
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I don't think that TwinBeam was meaning to send something quite as complex as the good Commander...
You want to send a tonne or two of payload to the Moon's surface? You could probobly do that with a maximal Delta-II or a Soyuz R-7. If you are "overbuilding" then you may want a little extra payload, the you ought to think about a Zenit-II/Proton or an Atlas-V 54X/55X class rocket.
The problem with robots is that they, well, to put it bluntly aren't all that capable yet. They really aren't competant substitutes for geologists; vision, dexterity, and intuition are all too diluted by having to go through a robot. Plus, since you are two light seconds away or so, fine motor control will be very inefficent to do by remote, even if we can make better robot hands.
This also limits their ability to build anything complex; because of the time lag combined with robots not having all that good a vision or dexterity means that anything delicate would have to be done verrrrry slowly. You couldn't get all that much done probobly. Robots for construction will be limited to pretty menial tasks, like bulldozing, cargo trucks, and so on. Servicing of telescope would probobly be out of their ballgame too.
Oh, and solar power is only good for two weeks out of the month around the Lunar equator, and trying to aim for one of the moutains of eternal sunlight is a big risk for the lander.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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Your idea of a robot is a lot different than mine: What you are describing, to me, are Remote Presence machines and currently possible to produce. My robots would be capable of autonomy, and at least a decade away. The manipulative time-lags can be compensated for, using predictive-preruns between decisive maneuvers, plus a certain amount of virtual reality blended with multi-spectral digital video sensing. By the time that telescope is ready to be serviced, you'll probably have my type robots too.
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Yes there are lots of robotic designs to create and of those there will be needs to modify the lander to accomidate each for the differing abilities to get from the lander to the work site.
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I often think the problem of AI is a lot like the problem's we are having with Fusion, only worse. If fusion has been 20 years off for 50 years now, it seems like a good AI has been 100 years off for the same length of time. I am pesemistic, intellegent autonomus programs have proven to be very difficult to make. Not necessarily because we lack the necessary hardware to create them (although this is certianly part of them problem), but because the programs are so complex. More powerful hardware does not seem to make these programs any easier to design.
I think it's telling that although our computing hardware has increased by litteraly an astronomical degree since the beginning of the space age, the computer programs that controle say that Deep Impact really aren't that much more complex then the ones that controled Viking or Voyager.
The problem is that there is a limit to how complex dependable programs can be, and this limit hasn't increased much. Most of the so called advancments in computer programming (OOP or whatever) have had little effect on the difficult in developing a complex program and no effect on how reliable complex programs are. I fear that for the next 20-50 years at least we are going to be stuck with what we have now. Robots that opperate mostly via Remote Presence with some minor autonomy when Remote Presence is not possible. The program necessary for a machine to make the correct decision in the wild and unpredictible frontier of space exploration is simply to great.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
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Watch an ant, exploring on its own, coping with obstacles, seeking whatever it's suposed to be ... is that intelligence at work? If not, it would seem to be adequate for what we would require beyond the range of realtime Remote Presence. Why not develop an "ant robot," then? But not self-replicating, of course!
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*...and there have been articles addressing the possibility of virtual assistants. I hope it doesn't turn out to be virtual everything...
--Cindy
P.S.:
Why not develop an "ant robot," then? But not self-replicating, of course!
What? No roboants at the cyber-picnic? Killjoy. :;):
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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You kill me, Cindy. :;):
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What? No roboants at the cyber-picnic? Killjoy.
A cyber picnic? With real virtual reality cakes? Nyam Nyam.
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Our capability with AI is very limited and in all likehood any robotic construction crew sent to the Moon will only have a limited hazard avoidance system on them.
To provide brains will require Humans in the loop operators from Earth who will control the devices like we control ROVs or UAVs now. The only problem though is the 4 second delay but that is not insurmountable and is hardly a problem for basic mining. For more complicated tasks a regime of taking your time will be enacted and with virtual reality to help not a problem.
And robots do have a lot of advantages for Base construction and with modifications we learn as we go along these will increase.
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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I see the 4-second interactive delay as an opportunity - a strong motivation to make the robots able to do more tasks on their own.
Getting highly capable robots ready for Mars could be one of the ways that going to the Moon first could really pay off. Sure, you could do it on Earth - but necessity is the mother of invention, and we just aren't as likely to do it if we were using mock-ups here on Earth.
There's a hierarchy of improvements, all of which can be uploaded AFTER the robots are on the Moon:
- upload new control software for a new task (i.e. manually programmed by a human on Earth). E.g. let the robot do all the "gross" motor movements like positioning a gripping tool near a bucket of bolts - then let the human operator do the fine motor skills like picking up the bolt or inserting it in a hole.
- train a learning robot here on Earth to do some of the fine motor skills, and upload the training data to the lunar robot.
- install learning software in the lunar robot, so it can learn a new fine motion control task by watching a human do it, and then learning to do the same task faster.
Eventually the human operator should only need to tell the robot "pick up that bolt, and insert it in that hole". Maybe even literally - speech can be recognized by computers on Earth and translated into a more compact representation for the lunar robot. Pattern recognition by the computers on Earth could pick out the bolt indicated, and translate the view into a precise position and orientation of the bolt relative to the Lunar robot.
While any new job that the robot isn't skilled at will be slow, shifts of workers can keep it busy 24 hours a day. And early work can focus on really simple tasks like bulldozing that should take minimal remote control. 4 or 5 shifts of modestly trained workers running two robots could probably cost under $1M a year, and in that year the robots could probably get around 200 human-equivalent-hours of semi-skilled labor done. They could accomplish a hell of a lot by the time astronauts arrive.
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Telerobotics are fun, Just like a videogame with real outcomes...And you only need to leave the habitat when that oversized tonka toy needs a new filter.
Manned exploration - fine, I'm not challenging that.
But suppose we send robots to get things set up, do exploration and experiments under semi-direct remote control.
How big would the rocket need to be, to deliver maybe one metric ton of equipment and robot(s) to the moon?
How much will the lander have to mass (doesn't need to lift off again, unlike manned lander).
How much will such a mission cost?
Twinbeam,
Sending an already assembled bot requires the robot to be smaller in the package to be balanced for launch. Its fully assembled shape is inherently incompatable with the lander. And if something is amiss, no humans to fix the failure.
Either way it will cost as much as fifty billion to support the needs of the mission.
A human presence allows multiple simultaneous tasks to be pursued and maintained with less infrastructure.
If the robodozer fails it needs a repair bot to handle the fix, but the repair bot must also handle the repair of say the tunnel digging machine. In many cases this is something that requires reprogramming.
Humans wont need the vast level of energy a robotic 20 year mission will require. And the manned lander doesnt need to come home.
The conformists just want it that way. They are alergic to working for food, water, and shelter and have an acute fear of abandonment...
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Telerobotics are fun, Just like a videogame with real outcomes...And you only need to leave the habitat when that oversized tonka toy needs a new filter.
Manned exploration - fine, I'm not challenging that.
But suppose we send robots to get things set up, do exploration and experiments under semi-direct remote control.
How big would the rocket need to be, to deliver maybe one metric ton of equipment and robot(s) to the moon?
How much will the lander have to mass (doesn't need to lift off again, unlike manned lander).
How much will such a mission cost?
Twinbeam,
Sending an already assembled bot requires the robot to be smaller in the package to be balanced for launch. Its fully assembled shape is inherently incompatable with the lander. And if something is amiss, no humans to fix the failure.Either way it will cost as much as fifty billion to support the needs of the mission.
A human presence allows multiple simultaneous tasks to be pursued and maintained with less infrastructure.
If the robodozer fails it needs a repair bot to handle the fix, but the repair bot must also handle the repair of say the tunnel digging machine. In many cases this is something that requires reprogramming.
Humans wont need the vast level of energy a robotic 20 year mission will require. And the manned lander doesnt need to come home.
The conformists just want it that way. They are alergic to working for food, water, and shelter and have an acute fear of abandonment...
srmeaney there is a large range of launchers that can currently deliver a cargo over a ton to the lunar region. For about $140 million you can get an Arianne V and its deleivery of 7.7tons.
And you are mistaken in that damaged robots cannot be repaired in situ or dragged back to a central repair station. I have said it before but if we can operate on a human being by telerobotic means and increasingly do so then we can work on a Robot. And most damage will be of a mechanical nature than something that requires extensive rebuilding.
This means that for the Moon and creation of base infrastructure there a tele-robotic rover using control from Earth is a possibility very efficient method of operation.
Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.
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The D10 Caterpillar (a minimum for a telerobotics machine in power and usefulness) is 90 ton. Any telerobotic system of heavy construction machinery will be between fifty and a hundred tons fully assembled.
Sending these systems to another Planet will require The very limit of HLLV and in some cases, the launch of component parts in seperate craft. A human presence to assemble and maintain is vital. Therefore it is going to cost in the magnitude of 100 billion and require five launchers (two to support the human presence).
For the five - ten ton range you can have the solar powered rover with the Camera, the Robot arms and the half ton sample tray and you can send it out to pick up rocks. Something that small will fit in a rover garage below the telerobotics lab of a single launcher. Mission cost with human presence here is 20-40 billion.
As we continue to reduce down to a non human presence, They become little more than a science project of limited time and usefulness. If you want to you could cut it back to a five ton rock retriever and an unmanned lander that will launch with a collection of five ton of rock and ship that back to earth in the lander (or at least the orbiting ISS lab-for quarantine reasons) for a cost of ten billion.
That would constitute a worthwhile science mission. Infact, that would have covered the human presence in the Apollo missions.
http://www.learnaboutrobots.com/space.htm]Telerobotics in Space
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The lunar rover - bigger than what I have in mind - massed under 500 pounds. And no way am I thinking of 90 ton bulldozers!
I'm talking about robots under 1 meter in dimension at launch, massing around 250 pounds. They aren't going to be doing massive heavy hauling and lifting, at least not at first. E.g., when they "bulldoze", it'd be maybe a 1 foot wide swath of dust or previously loosened lunar soil.
Total mission cost, operated for 5-10 years, might be kept to around $200M, not counting any follow-up missions.
Instead of sending multi-tons of heavy equipment, I'd like to see us spend several years of robotic labor developing the ability to extract, refine, and cast large, somewhat crude aluminum structural parts - bulldozer blades, struts, axels, wheels, maybe crude storage tanks for LOX. Then we can ship up just control, power, and other high precision components, and have the robots put together big machinery.
Sure it'll be slower than if we just dumped $10 billion dollars into shipping up heavy equipment - but what would we learn that way? We'd drive our massive shipped-in bulldozers around and pile up some dirt - but without the "build stuff we need" attitude, in the long run it'd be a dead end. The slow pace of the robots will drive users to be as inventive as possible, to get the most value from them.
I say, get two small but capable robots up there, under NASA over-sight and direct day-to-day control, but with a consortium of universities in charge of what gets done, motivating academic research and student projects centered on making the robots smarter, maximizing their productivity, adding to their tools, etc.
When we get manned missions going, if the robots have been well used, there should be a number of tasks that a human can do well and quickly to finish off jobs the robots started.
(This has veered well away from "Interplanetary transportation". Given direct human control from Earth, combined with interactions with and supplying the needs of human astronauts, and a bit of the "man vs robots" controversy, I think it'd be justifiable to continue it under "Human Missions", if anyone is interested in replying further. I'll create a starter topic.)
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Sure it'll be slower than if we just dumped $10 billion dollars into shipping up heavy equipment - but what would we learn that way? We'd drive our massive shipped-in bulldozers around and pile up some dirt - but without the "build stuff we need" attitude, in the long run it'd be a dead end. The slow pace of the robots will drive users to be as inventive as possible, to get the most value from them.
On the contrary. Massive Colonization requires the ability to work in tons of ceramic materials. Even the construction of Ceramic interlocking pipe components five metres in diameter will allow artificial cave tunnels to be built on the surface.
A progressive tool up while necessary because we have little to no experience in the field (we will need it if we commit to ten million people going to Mars) is better served by a human presence, only where humans are going to be.
If you want robots building robots building robots... justify it on a world where we have no intention of sending people until after the planet is terraformed.
Way of track...Back to Robots on the Moon (and Mars)
I say, get two small but capable robots up there, under NASA over-sight and direct day-to-day control, but with a consortium of universities in charge of what gets done, motivating academic research and student projects centered on making the robots smarter, maximizing their productivity, adding to their tools, etc.
On Mars you would need a Fuel cell plant to generate C2H2 (Acetylene) this would allow the production of Small objects by the lander in an electric Gas plasma environment. The robots would need to continuously retrieve the materials needed. And you could keep the cost down by using small Robots. But that is a small, inefficient project by comparrison to what we need.
The rate of Mars colonization will need to be around 100,000 people per year (the absolute possible peak of technological exploitation).
"Crunch!" the sound made by a 90 ton robotic bulldozer as it runs over Sojourner.
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I welcome debate - but let's move it over to "human missions" - I've started a topic there. (I think it fits - see above and the first post there.)
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