Advanced automation

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Intro

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Advanced automation here refers to sophisticated automated systems, ideally with the additional capability for self-maintenance and repair, mostly requiring little or no human interaction to operate, apart from top-level guidance. Not being reliant on human effort to scale, these systems would hugely magnify our capability for production and decouple human time and effort from industrial productivity, allowing us to create as much of anything that is needed, while releasing people from mindless labour. This situation will arise when automated harvesting of raw materials is combined with automated logistics (already commonplace), automated transport systems, robotic manufacturing and self-maintenance and repair, creating fully automated production of useful goods.

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.

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Sections

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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.

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. A little similar to the way humans and animals have pain receptors that let the brain know when a part is damaged. Unlike humans, however, the computer would have a complete blueprint for how it functions, which would allow precise diagnosis, and flawless new parts could be fabricated to replace broken ones,

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-rfid-powder.jpg

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.


A quite different approach to self-repairing machines would be to build them out of self-healing materials 11px-Wikipedia_logo.jpg. It is likely that sophisticated self-repairing machines in the future will utilise both these methods.

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Increasing capacity automatically

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Automated infrastructure refers to the key infrastructure needed for advanced automation being a fully closed loop. These systems have the capacity to self-maintain and self-repair with little or no human intervention, keeping themselves in the condition and within the parameters set by the engineers. Systems such as transport networks, power generation, water treatment plants, mines, material processing plants, factories and other industrial systems. If these systems are all automated and interface with each other, the means for production for humanity will be ultimately efficient and scalable. These complex systems can be developed using the power of open collaborative design, which has the additional benefit of giving transparency to their development. Having the industrial infrastructure fully automated means it can be easily scaled up to provide everything that the global population requires with ultimate flexibility, and it frees people up to do things that people are good at and want to do.35px-More_large.png
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