Having made a few dry stone walls I can attest to the merit of this achievement. Judging where rocks are to be placed, and in what orientation is a zen art.
Anecdotally... I once tried to get wild flowers to grow on a stone wall. Every year we would seed the wall, only for the seeds to fall out or be eaten by birds. On inspiration, my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. Perfect result! The following year it was covered in flowers.
Not only is this a technical marvel, but it has potential construction physics implications.
In simple terms, currently we expend energy to fragment rock, and then we expend additional energy (as concrete) to glue it back together. We do all this to re-arrange rocks into a shape (and strength) we want, and most importantly to do it cheap.
Suddenly, an alternative just got a lot cheaper.
Clearly this isn't fully baked yet (and it's hardly a drop-in replacement for reinforced/pretensioned/cantilevered/etc) but for things like heavy infrastructure and civil engineering this might offer a way to achieve fundamental thermodynamic improvements.
For future walls, try a Cornish hedge. Despite the name, these are actually dry stone walls with an earth core. Mature ones are normally covered in wildflowers. Here's how they're made. http://www.cornishhedges.co.uk/PDF/building.pdf
This isn't really a proper wall though, it's a single thickness stack. I don't think it could handle any lateral force at all without toppling. If this machine could build a double skin wall with batter, wall heads, and hearting throughout the center, I'd be really impressed!
Just wanted to share that in my country (Spain) and more concretely in my area (rural part of Catalonia) we have a building technique called “Pedra Seca” literal translation is “Dry Stone”. It basically involves building stuff with just rocks, nothing more. It’s still in use mostly in agricultural fields.
Dry stone walling is also very common in the UK. It's a complex and now expensive skill, but a properly-built (this bit is key) wall will stay put for well over a hundred years because the rocks can shift a little rather then cracking the structure as temperatures change and water drains right out of them.
It's also very locally distinctive because the shape of the stones and therefore the wall layout and texture depends on the stones you naturally have nearby.
I rode through a huge area filled with these sorts of walls somewhere wayyy down a dirt road in rural central Mexico, sorta near Zacatecas. It looked like it was once a vineyard, or something like that...I'd never seen walls that looked this way before. Really beautiful. I had no idea that it was originally a European thing.
Interesting! I am living in Catalonia now, but in Barcelona. I haven't seen (or paid attention) to a wall like that. Will pay more attention and try to find some nearby. Thanks!
This seems like game changing technology. There are a heap of such walls around here, some built long ago by Dalmation immigrants (and some allegedly by German POWs). It's quite labour intensive and highly skilled to create them.
We have some on our property, used to retain the hillside after land slips. They were built with an excavator by a gnarly old guy who was unbelievably skilled.
One thing I wonder is whether these are safe. These things terrify the shit out of me, as one toppling rock of that size could instantly kill a child.
Walls built by human operators of sufficient skill are safe (I know, I went around and tried to wobble every single rock to make sure). But are these built to the same level?
Nice. Heavy equipment with many degrees of freedom is hard for humans to control. Some operators are really good, but not all of them.
A backhoe hooked up to a virtual reality input arm with force feedback was built several decades ago. The operator could feel obstructions, and dig out the dirt around a pipe by feel. Never became a product, though. Probably too early.
The force feedback would be yet another layer of tetchy stuff to keep running in a really harsh environment.
I've know backhoe operators who strongly preferred older equipment, when its too new the pins are too tight and they have no "slop" to work with. That slop is what they're using for sensory input, if you watch them. With attention and experience that's real time feedback.
The whole machine is the force feedback mechanism. You're not just sitting there in a comfy chair pulling levers, you're on top of a collection of systems all singing their own song in response to the varying loads placed on them.
Do operators currently need to manually control every movement of the arm? I always assumed that such heavy equipment uses inverse kinematics to help the operator.
ETH Zurich[1, 2] is fairly famous as an engineering school. Somehow in my mind it is linked with computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra[3], but according to the Wiki he was never based there.
With upcoming multimodal foundation models, there will be many more robots with increasing capabilities soon. The world of robotics will look very different just in the next 5 years.
You should take both of those announcements with a huge dollop of salt. Even the article you shared is extremely skeptical of the actual progress of Tesla's robot. And Chinese press releases should really not be read into too much - they are often much more for internal signalling then information.
Either way, there are companies which are much farther along than those - Boston Dynamics has a series of extremely impressive robots. They are still very far away from being a consumer technology. The kinds of physical power required to achieve the movements makes them extremely dangerous to be around on any malfunction or glitch, and they are very heavy machinery. Even animals and other humans, which are far more advanced in terms of their ability to control their movements, sometimes accidentally hurt others (stepping on your toes, turning around and hitting you when they didn't know you're there, etc.). Imagine a several hundred kilo machine stepping on your toes with its full weight just because it mis-estimated your movements.
Considering it scans all the rocks, you'd think it would be able to fit the rocks together better. I don't expect a Incan wall, but I think it would be able to construct a tighter fitting wall if it were programmed to care.
An Incan wall is much "easier" (airqoted qualifier).
There's much effort required to square up stone and shape faces, a lot of drilling, wedges, and precision chisel finishing.
However, once it comes to the stacking it's been reduced to a bricklaying exercise (already solved for robots and posted to HN).
Traditional drywall evolved from field clearing, stacking rocks to get them out of the way and to reduce wind across exposed otherwise rocky potential fields.
Stacking and balancing "as they come" or with relative minimal look ahead | reshuffle queuing is a tougher proposition; this is impressive work.
It could perhaps if it had all rocks available up front to scan and plan the entire wall with. But it retrieves one rock at a time and can only place on the top row somewhere. Given the geometries are random I wouldn’t expect it to reliably have tight fits given how it’s sampling and placing.
I'm surprised centimeter precision is sufficient. I'd have thought millimeter precision or so would be required. It feels like 1cm could accumulate to a gap or could spell the difference between stable points contacting and not.
IIUC cm precision should be fine if the algorithms looking for stable placement accounts for that cm (and reality id imagine it’d account for less precision than that). If a placement needs sub cm precision the algorithm would just discard that option.
Additionally there shouldn’t be any accumulation in a specific direction. Any accumulated gaps would be accounted for when placing the next rock and rectified to within a cm.
Perhaps in hundreds of years they'll be able to deploy AI robots to poorer regions of the world to build basic utilities, mine resources, and even whole cities from nothing. Or have them depoloyed to current cities constantly repairing and optimizing infrastructure.
This is incredible because the vast majority of what it takes to build roads, rail tracks, docks, and such infrastructure is all in the clearing and relandscaping of land. It doesn't have to be perfect in terms of aesthetics or seals, but it has to be very stable and able to take the thin layer of road surface, rails, concrete on top and the weight that they'd carry.
To be able to automate the landscaping is to massively reduce the cost of infrastructure projects in terms of labour and materials, but also likely the time to deliver them too.
With this type of advancement, we may finally be ready to tackle the biggest challenge for domestic robots since domestic robot were envisioned: ironing and folding clothes.
I was once on a mountain top composed almost entirely of rocks like these. I'd like to give a sand castle artist this excavator and ask them to turn it into a fairy tale.
- Wouldn’t this type of wall normally be built using heavy machinery without laborers lifting and placing heavy rocks?
- A heavy machinery operator would no longer be needed, but wouldn’t you need 1 or more people to operate and manage the robot as well as verify the solution?
It’s a really cool direction for construction but I wonder what the net/net cost savings would really be in the near future anyway.
I don't like wars, but being able to build a wall out of some broken concrete blocks without it being man handled is a good feature I believe.
Also being able to build during a long period of time (during the night for example) make the job less exhausting.
Also one could think of it as an assistant: put some augmented reality display, and let the machine showing to the operator where to put the rock.
Or help for building records: you keep the operator part, but you record the scans and position and weights during construction phase, so you can eventually run simulation later to know how the wall will change over time etc.
[+] [-] Daub|2 years ago|reply
Anecdotally... I once tried to get wild flowers to grow on a stone wall. Every year we would seed the wall, only for the seeds to fall out or be eaten by birds. On inspiration, my boss filled a few shotgun cartridges up with seeds and fired them at the wall. Perfect result! The following year it was covered in flowers.
[+] [-] schiffern|2 years ago|reply
In simple terms, currently we expend energy to fragment rock, and then we expend additional energy (as concrete) to glue it back together. We do all this to re-arrange rocks into a shape (and strength) we want, and most importantly to do it cheap.
Suddenly, an alternative just got a lot cheaper.
Clearly this isn't fully baked yet (and it's hardly a drop-in replacement for reinforced/pretensioned/cantilevered/etc) but for things like heavy infrastructure and civil engineering this might offer a way to achieve fundamental thermodynamic improvements.
Excited to see where this technology goes.
[+] [-] ascorbic|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|2 years ago|reply
A friend of mind had a hill in his yard, and hired a guy that knew the local seed mix to hydroseed it. It went well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroseeding
Can't figure a good word would be for what your boss did. It's not quite pyroseeding...
[+] [-] 93po|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigiDigiorno|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Matumio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lapsed_pacifist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Obscurity4340|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adammarples|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jvidalv|2 years ago|reply
Here are a few examples:
https://dd9de8c7b7.cbaul-cdnwnd.com/b5fbcf0e77b7b72ef95acd62...
https://static1.ara.cat/clip/98e3619e-8dd2-4c0b-828c-254a62e...
The google search:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=58408328...
[+] [-] adhesive_wombat|2 years ago|reply
It's also very locally distinctive because the shape of the stones and therefore the wall layout and texture depends on the stones you naturally have nearby.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_stone#/media/File%3ADry_st...
[+] [-] simon_acca|2 years ago|reply
We have them in Italy too btw, search for “muretti a secco”.
[+] [-] pier25|2 years ago|reply
https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marge
[+] [-] jlevers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imp0cat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Biganon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beachy|2 years ago|reply
We have some on our property, used to retain the hillside after land slips. They were built with an excavator by a gnarly old guy who was unbelievably skilled.
One thing I wonder is whether these are safe. These things terrify the shit out of me, as one toppling rock of that size could instantly kill a child.
Walls built by human operators of sufficient skill are safe (I know, I went around and tried to wobble every single rock to make sure). But are these built to the same level?
[+] [-] unglaublich|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiTIXAAulzI
https://gravisrobotics.com/
[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
A backhoe hooked up to a virtual reality input arm with force feedback was built several decades ago. The operator could feel obstructions, and dig out the dirt around a pipe by feel. Never became a product, though. Probably too early.
[+] [-] h2odragon|2 years ago|reply
I've know backhoe operators who strongly preferred older equipment, when its too new the pins are too tight and they have no "slop" to work with. That slop is what they're using for sensory input, if you watch them. With attention and experience that's real time feedback.
The whole machine is the force feedback mechanism. You're not just sitting there in a comfy chair pulling levers, you're on top of a collection of systems all singing their own song in response to the varying loads placed on them.
[+] [-] zyxin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fernly|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich [2] https://ethz.ch/en.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
[+] [-] hollerith|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|2 years ago|reply
Einstein, among others, studied there [1]
[1] https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/global/events/digitaler-ei...
[+] [-] mahkeiro|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/P7wmotyKgXc
[+] [-] nopinsight|2 years ago|reply
With upcoming multimodal foundation models, there will be many more robots with increasing capabilities soon. The world of robotics will look very different just in the next 5 years.
Some announcements:
China’s plan: “…China aims to be ready to mass-produce humanoids by 2025.” https://www.therobotreport.com/china-plans-to-mass-produce-h...
Tesla Robot: “…it would be low cost and available to the public sometime between 2025 and 2027. ” https://builtin.com/robotics/tesla-robot
[+] [-] tsimionescu|2 years ago|reply
Either way, there are companies which are much farther along than those - Boston Dynamics has a series of extremely impressive robots. They are still very far away from being a consumer technology. The kinds of physical power required to achieve the movements makes them extremely dangerous to be around on any malfunction or glitch, and they are very heavy machinery. Even animals and other humans, which are far more advanced in terms of their ability to control their movements, sometimes accidentally hurt others (stepping on your toes, turning around and hitting you when they didn't know you're there, etc.). Imagine a several hundred kilo machine stepping on your toes with its full weight just because it mis-estimated your movements.
[+] [-] BobaFloutist|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soperj|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defrost|2 years ago|reply
There's much effort required to square up stone and shape faces, a lot of drilling, wedges, and precision chisel finishing.
However, once it comes to the stacking it's been reduced to a bricklaying exercise (already solved for robots and posted to HN).
Traditional drywall evolved from field clearing, stacking rocks to get them out of the way and to reduce wind across exposed otherwise rocky potential fields.
Stacking and balancing "as they come" or with relative minimal look ahead | reshuffle queuing is a tougher proposition; this is impressive work.
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferout|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dryrocks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rendaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichieAHB|2 years ago|reply
Additionally there shouldn’t be any accumulation in a specific direction. Any accumulated gaps would be accounted for when placing the next rock and rectified to within a cm.
[+] [-] trebligdivad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExMachina73|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelgares|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|2 years ago|reply
To be able to automate the landscaping is to massively reduce the cost of infrastructure projects in terms of labour and materials, but also likely the time to deliver them too.
[+] [-] hliyan|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] progne|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkoubaa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|2 years ago|reply
- A heavy machinery operator would no longer be needed, but wouldn’t you need 1 or more people to operate and manage the robot as well as verify the solution?
It’s a really cool direction for construction but I wonder what the net/net cost savings would really be in the near future anyway.
[+] [-] logtempo|2 years ago|reply
Also being able to build during a long period of time (during the night for example) make the job less exhausting.
Also one could think of it as an assistant: put some augmented reality display, and let the machine showing to the operator where to put the rock.
Or help for building records: you keep the operator part, but you record the scans and position and weights during construction phase, so you can eventually run simulation later to know how the wall will change over time etc.
[+] [-] maxglute|2 years ago|reply