They are still trying to figure out their market. They are essentially selling a product the world isn’t quite ready for.
If it was dirt cheap I would buy one, attach a vacuum to it and have it clean my place. But they are super expensive, so fat chance of that.
Spot, the yellow dog, seems to be targeted at the notion of human safety. Think something like a building demo job gone wrong, send in the robot to pull out the dynamite.
In Norway they are being tested on oil platforms. If this robot can be used to fix one single problem on a platform that would otherwise have required a production shutdown...it’ll pay for itself several (hundred?) times over. This is especially the case for older platforms where you need to be more hands on and less can be done remotely.
We had a mountain side in Norway that was near collapsing and all the residents below it were evacuated every two weeks. The geologists wanted to use dynamite to dislodge it, but it was too dangerous for humans. In the future we might send a versatile robot like Spot up in a drone and have him plant the explosives. If he blows up in the process that would obviously suck, but still fairly cheap for what he would have accomplished.
> We had a mountain side in Norway that was near collapsing and all the residents below it were evacuated every two weeks. The geologists wanted to use dynamite to dislodge it, but it was too dangerous for humans. In the future we might send a versatile robot like Spot up in a drone and have him plant the explosives. If he blows up in the process that would obviously suck, but still fairly cheap for what he would have accomplished.
Why not just drop a bomb from an airplane? That's already pretty well established technology. I'm pretty sure I've read about various places throwing hand grenades or dynamite from helicopters by hand to do that. Or let the nearest friendly air force drop a few of their lightest bombs on it for practice.
They tried dropping water during the winter and let it freeze.
I think dropping a bomb would do more harm then good, and might not even dislodge anything. I think they wanted to drill close to the fault line and insert explosives deep into the mountain.
If it was dirt cheap I would buy one, attach a vacuum to it and have it clean my place. But they are super expensive, so fat chance of that.
Spot, the yellow dog, seems to be targeted at the notion of human safety. Think something like a building demo job gone wrong, send in the robot to pull out the dynamite.
In Norway they are being tested on oil platforms. If this robot can be used to fix one single problem on a platform that would otherwise have required a production shutdown...it’ll pay for itself several (hundred?) times over. This is especially the case for older platforms where you need to be more hands on and less can be done remotely.
We had a mountain side in Norway that was near collapsing and all the residents below it were evacuated every two weeks. The geologists wanted to use dynamite to dislodge it, but it was too dangerous for humans. In the future we might send a versatile robot like Spot up in a drone and have him plant the explosives. If he blows up in the process that would obviously suck, but still fairly cheap for what he would have accomplished.