Advanced automation

Intro

In Western countries many industrial process are becoming highly automated already, but human effort is needed for construction and commissioning as well as maintenance and repair. In developing nations, there is not much automation at all due to labour being so cheap; however this is a great waste of human lives.

These self-repairing systems are based on technologies and knowledge that we already possess. No fictional concepts or unattainable artificial intelligence are required to make this happen. We have the ability today to create systems that provide for the global population's basic needs and far beyond, while minimising our impact on the environment – these two aspects are not mutually exclusive.

Sections

Main Page > Advanced automation

Self-maintenance and repair

If complicated physical systems were able to be serviced and repaired completely automatically there would be many advantages. There would be higher productivity and efficiency without people in the loop - we tend to slow things down and are error prone; also people could be freed up to do something less menial; and the systems could scale quickly when more capacity is needed.

Machines today, such as industrial machinery, are designed to be looked after and serviced by people, and it would likely need artificial intelligence beyond our current capabilities to maintain or repair these systems completely autonomously. However it is feasible to design them from the outset to be maintained autonomously; designed in a modular fashion with components easily removed and replaced by another machine, and embedded wired or wireless sensors giving the ability to diagnose faults on all significant parts.

(Open collaborative design tends to result in highly modular designs, as evidenced by Mozilla Firefox, Linux, OpenEEG and others. This is a result of different people with different needs all adding their own modules. It is a happy side-effect that this lends itself to easy maintenance.)

Many parameters can now be sensed with solid-state sensors, manufactured on tiny silicon chips, which can be embedded within functioning machines. If the signatures from multiple sensors relating to each machine function is known when operating within normal bounds, it provides a method for pin-pointing problems with great accuracy. Vibration, temperature, rotation, pressure, distance, voltage, acceleration and structural integrity as examples. This already happens to a certain extent on machines today such as vehicles but it only applies to a small sub-set of vital components. What we are talking about here is having multiple micro-sensors within every single component and also scattered throughout structural parts.

Operations can be assessed in real-time and if there is a failure then the defective parts, or the relevant sub-assembly, can be replaced. In many instances it may be possible to know a failure is imminent before it actually happens due to an abnormal rise in temperature or vibration for example. With the system containing a full three-dimensional schematic with exact positions and extraction paths for every part, a repair machine can swap the part without requiring any human intervention.

Where would the replacement parts come from? Either held locally in a store, or shipped in via automated transport, or even manufactured on demand via additive fabrication or CNC milling.

So the physical aspects of the machines need to be designed with autonomous replacement in mind, with magnetic, RFID or optical cues that can easily be read by a repair robot, and highly modular design of components allowing them to easily be extracted and replaced. For instance, a gearbox that slots in or out as a single cartridge.

This same principle, by extension could allow these self-maintaining systems to become self-building too, which means that scaling up facilities becomes easy. More autonomous farming equipment required? Just increase the scale of the agricultural manufacturing facilities, and now you have a greater output of agricultural machinery. A little simplistic perhaps, but you get the idea.

The shape of sensors to come

Hitachi's µ-Chip (shown in top image) is 0.4 x 0.4mm in size. With a small antennae (not shown) it is able to transmit a 128 bit ID number. However, in the lower image is a microscope image of Hitachi's new 'RFID powder', currently in development, shown next to a human hair. It is 64 times smaller by area than the original µ-Chip and has the same capability and can be embedded within a sheet of paper [1]. It will not be long before various types of solid-state sensor can be made on a similar scale and embedded within every component of a machine giving unprecedented information relating to its operation.

Large scale industry

It seems likely that a lot of goods and products made today in factories will increasingly be made using smaller-scale flexible computer-controlled manufacturing methods dispersed across communities and even in homes. Also tasks like water treatment, food production and power generation may well become more distributed and decentralized, again perhaps down to the domestic level.

However larger scale industrial systems are likely to remain for some time to come doing jobs such as mining, material processing and recycling, transport infrastructure and specialised manufacturing and construction.

Nanotechnology

(As interesting and capable as advanced nanotechnology is likely to be, it is not actually a requirement for the development of an advanced post-scarcity society, which can be achieved with today's technology. Having said that, nanotech-based decentralized fabrication, more than any other technology, will make post-scarcity not merely possible, but easy. Anyway, the social changeover to an advanced post-scarcity society will not happen overnight, we must take into account the technologies that will be developed in the intervening years.)

The advanced automation section has mainly focused on automation technologies using robotics and 'macro'-scale systems, as it describes systems that could be achieved with today's technology. However, even more sophisticated and capable technology using nano-scale devices  (at the atomic and molecular scale) are likely to be feasible in the coming decades, that could ultimately give us a similar level of control over matter that we currently have over information using computers. See also related Diamond Mechanosynthesis.

This is likely to end up being a mixture of top-down engineering techniques related to current semi-conductor fabrication  and micro-electro-mechanical systems  (MEMS), true bottom-up molecular engineering and self-assembly, and derivatives from biotechnology . This is likely to give us systems of unprecedented precision, capability and small size that will further revolutionise manufacturing, power generation, agriculture and medicine.

Nano-scale devices that could be sent inside the human body as a medical intervention are being developed. Mice have already been cured of type-I diabetes with this method^[2].

Current nanotechnology such as this is limited to simple designs on the nanometer scale (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter). We currently have instruments that allow atomically-precise engineering like this —

This is a picture taken by a scanning tunnelling microscope in 1990. It shows the IBM logo constructed from 35 xenon atoms on a nickel surface. The aim is to increase the complexity of atomically-precise manufacturing until we can make things like this —

This is a computer-simulated design of a gear, built out of atoms, that could be used to power a nanorobot. As technology progresses in the next two or three decades, we expect to see more and more sophisticated atomically-precise engineering, marking the move from 'nanoparticles' to 'nanorobots'. These tiny robots could be equipped with onboard computers, sensors and artificial intelligence systems and could be controlled by external acoustic signals. They would be about 100 nanometers in diameter (meaning a trillion could be packed into one cubic millimeter). The applications of this technology would be as broad as the applications of computers; few areas of life will be unaffected if and when atomically-precise engineering comes to full fruition, which Ray Kurzweil has calculated will happen around 2025 (based on extrapolating sustained trends of miniaturization). Applications of nanotechnology include —

• Turning virtual designs into physical objects. Nanorobots could be designed to construct anything, much in the same way that macro-scale robots do in factories nowadays. This would allow for cheap, atomically-precise manufacturing of anything, including all machines now invented, and many things that are impossible to build without nanoscale assembly. Using atomically-precise manufacturing, we can build better fuel cells and capacitors for energy storage, more compact computer processors, better solar cells, we can build superstrong, lightweight materials made from carbon bound together in customized diamond-like structures. These new manufacturing capabilities would open up huge new vistas in engineering; stronger lighter materials and better energy storage would change the face of transport, solar cells could be made so light and so small they could be sprayed on to any surface
  The social effect of such a revolution in technology would be unimaginable. Anyone with manufacturing nanorobots could conjure up any object on their desktop, and this process would be cheap, as the robots would be built mostly from carbon and silicon, which are abundant, and could be made to self-replicate, so there would be hardly any manufacturing costs. It is difficult to imagine a scarcity-based monetary economy surviving in a situation when anyone can make anything for free.
• Medicine. Nanorobots are a similar size to a virus, and could be programmed to search-and-destroy any pathogenic virus or bacteria. They could also be used to reverse some of the metabolic damage caused by aging, allowing us to live longer, healthier lives. One nanorobot called a respirocyte has been fully designed and simulated. It is an artificial red blood cell, but transports 236 times more oxygen than natural red blood cells. Calculations show that replacing 10% of your red blood cells with respirocytes would enable you to hold your breath for four hours ^[3], which would have medical applications as well as making scuba diving a lot more fun.
• Environmental repair. Nanotechnology could be used to eat up oil slicks or repair other environmental damage
• In the home, nanotechnology could create self-cleaning surfaces.

Robotics

• Automated construction of buildings
• Mass construction of useful machines (i.e. what robots are already used for)
• Menial tasks like cleaning. Robotic vacuum cleaners, for example, already exist

Increasing capacity automatically as required

A major advantage of having processes almost completely automated is that capacity can easily be scaled up. Just as the manufacturing and construction machinery can be repaired automatically, more manufacturing machinery can also be created by machine, as needed.

This capability means we will be able to do things that are simply not possible at the moment. Mega-scale engineering projects become feasible. If a task is complicated, tedious and a great effort we only need to design the system for the job and let it get on with it. Easier said than done of course. But as these systems become more sophisticated, so will the design tools used to create them. People will be able to interface with these complex systems at ever higher levels of abstraction (although there will be plenty of technically-minded who understand the lower levels too). It will be similar to high-level programming languages hiding the lower levels of code - the individual nuts and bolts will be like the zeros and ones of machine code .

Automated infrastructure

People in control

These systems needs to be carefully controlled by people. We will always need to understand how they work, at every level, and they will need to be monitored. Some people wonder whether we will get to a stage where the machines are so sophisticated, and we have relied on them for so long, that no-one will actually know how they work, and therefore we will not be fully in control of them. The reality is that there will always be people interested in this sort of thing - engineers, scientists and geeks in general. They want to know how to make things and understand how they work. There always have been technically-minded people, and have no doubt there always will be.

People will need to improve the designs and make sure they are safe and efficient. We must always remain part of the loop in terms of ultimate control. It is highly likely that we will develop computer-controlled systems more capable at certain tasks than we are, in fact we already have done, but this trend will inevitably continue until there is very little in terms of systems control that can't be done better by a computer. But however sophisticated these systems become they are still just tools for our service — a means to an end. There will always be a threshold where higher-level decisions can only be made with the judgement of people, communities or wider society, and it is important that this threshold should not creep upwards unnoticed over time.

See also

• Turning virtual designs into physical objects (digital manufacturing) - for information on various smaller scale computer-controlled flexible manufacturing techniques

Open-source robotics

Not manufacturing as such, but an important part of the jigsaw:

• Willow Garage, started by an early Google employee, and has close links with Stanford University that are developing ROS (Robot Operating System) , OpenCV and the PR2 hardware platform. Mission & History