Controlling an excavator from thousands of miles away - GIF

[Jon]

Controlling an excavator from thousands of miles away.




Previously:

Excavator works on trash fire - video
Amphibious excavator poling itself downriver - GIF
Excavator travels downhill
Using a mini excavator up a stairwell - GIF

[Frank S]

I like that the control unit the guy is sitting in is a duplicate of what would be in the excavator this way a regular excavator operator would be comfortable controlling the machine instead of having to use some Xbox controller the multi screen views gives him a much better perspective of where he is digging all while sitting in safety this technique could be utilized from an orbiting spacecraft while an eacavator was doing work down on a planet's, moon's of even an asteroid's surface

[cmarlow]

Why control from orbit if you could do it from Earth instead? I wonder if the lag time would be noticeable?

[Frank S]

Why control from orbit if you could do it from Earth instead? I wonder if the lag time would be noticeable?

You would need to be in orbit preferably geosynchronous with which ever planet moon or asteroid you were mining to remain in constant contact. and to minimalize lag time.
So while a 1.3 second delay one way direct communications may not be devastating between the Earth and the moon, plus there is a network of satellites the signal could be relayed from a ground based console to a machine working on the surface each time a signal is relayed from one transmitter to the next receiver then transmitted again the couple of nano seconds this takes is accumulative. the signal would have to be sent on a dedicated secure band width modulation or this signal could become jumbled or hacked. Think of some 10 or 11 year old who stumbled upon the signal and thought they were playing a videogame
mining an asteroid would definitely require being in orbit as would work on Mars due to the over 4 minute delay.
But I can see several applications for such a rig in many places here on Earth the machine could be operating in a hazardous environment while the operator was a safe distance away, think of an accident at a nuclear power plant

[nova_robotics]

This is the future. Particularly for things like cranes where 98% of the day you have some guy just sitting there not touching the controls, burning up huge money. It is required that the crane should be attended, but there's no reason someone can't do that remotely for a fraction of the cost of onsite labour.

Also I have a bunch of service robots and they have remote operation capability. I've had people welding from thousands of miles away.

[cmarlow]

I have seen some remote operated mining equipment for ground you can't send men to. There is one uranium mine at McArthur River, Saskatchewan, Canada, that were mining a with remote equipment.

[nova_robotics]

Ah yes, Cameco. I worked for a company that was working there and actually nearly took a job on site. Kinda glad I didn't.