[SpaceProgram] Fwd: [tt] (Open Manufacturing) Telebase Alpha (concat) (fwd)

[Michael Turner]

"Hacking" as a term applied to high-end technology hobbyist projects got
its start with the MIT Model Railroaders. In the forwarded email, Eric
Hunting muses, after seeing how fantastically it has morphed toward
stunning realism,

"Strangely, despite the relative ease and economy of such a
demonstration, for a year now ESA has made no attempt to do this. No one in
the space establishment is proposing anything like this.

In general, there's much that can be done at subscale; probably everything
that ever worked in space was first done that way. And that's not changing
any time soon. Note, for example, that Deep Space Industries, despite its
dolby-ized CGI depiction of colossal asteroid mining operations, e.g.,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIY_fmvFDhM

has recently headed more in a direction I started taking in late 2012: DSI
has retained femtosatellite pioneer Mason Peck to look into how sprinkling
Sprites onto asteroids from nanosat probes might aid in prospecting.


https://deepspaceindustries.com/nasa-selects-deep-space-for-two-asteroid-contracts/


Regards,
Michael Turner
Executive Director
Project Persephone
K-1 bldg 3F
7-2-6 Nishishinjuku
Shinjuku-ku Tokyo 160-0023
Tel: +81 (3) 6890-1140
Fax: +81 (3) 6890-1158
Mobile: +81 (90) 5203-8682
turner at projectpersephone.org
http://www.projectpersephone.org/

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward
together in the same direction." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl>
Date: Fri, May 27, 2016 at 6:26 AM
Subject: [tt] (Open Manufacturing) Telebase Alpha (concat) (fwd)
To: rtomek at ceti.pl


----- Forwarded message from Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com> -----

Date: Mon, 16 May 2016 17:53:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
To: Open Manufacturing <openmanufacturing at googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Open Manufacturing] Telebase Alpha

Trying to distract myself from other depressing matters, I've been thinking
a lot lately about the persistently retrofuturist nature of the space
establishment vision, the transhumanist prospect of space development, the
course of amateur robotics development, and the concept of the telebase.
I've also been watching a lot of Youtube videos about the hobby of RC
construction models <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdWH12ethew>--something
more popular in Europe than the US, where RC racing dominates. I find them
calming, like watching an aquarium. But what's interesting about them is
how sophisticated these models have become in recent years. Now featuring
digital controls, powerful mini-hydraulics systems, digital sound effects
systems, and sometimes first-person video systems, these models have become
real telerobots. And their builders aren't just interested in realism of
appearance. They seek realism in function too. So, all across the year, you
have these meets and shows, sometimes in dedicated venues
<http://www.rc-glashaus.de/>, where miniature villages are created and
these machines are put through their paces. Excavators and earth movers
move earth around, sometimes building scale landscape features with
retaining walls, pilings, gabion baskets, and concrete blocks. Little earth
screening drums sort soil into various grades. Little forklifts shift
pallets around little shipping depots and load and unload trucks. Container
lifts manage little shipping container terminals. Little farm vehicles till
and sow miniature fields. Snow cats sculpt miniature ski slopes. Fire and
emergency vehicles put out actual fires. Cranes and tow trucks rescue
vehicles if they get stuck in ditches or tip over. And it's all
cooperative. When I look at these things I see more than just a bunch of
models simulating mundane activity. I see hints of a machine civilization.
I see machines homesteading.

One of the often overlooked bits of computer history is that the idea of
'hacking', along with many other principles of modern computing and digital
control, had its roots in the MIT Tech Model Railway Club
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STVdCJaG0bY>; a very large communal model
train layout created in a disused campus industrial building that exists to
this day. Models trains were a good petri dish for exploring principles of
automated control theory while offering a fun creative outlet and a good
social venue. I've often wondered what might be a more contemporary form of
this. Amateur robotics today tends to be about 'sports'. Competition and
war. Racing, analogs of team sports, and cockfighting. Today's robot events
seem to rarely feature any sort of cooperative activity. Perhaps this is a
reflection of a common Darwinian or Objectivist philosophy. Everything is a
contest of survival of the fittest. Or maybe it's just that no model of
cooperative robot activity has ever occurred to anyone in this community.
What would they do?

A year ago ESA announced their latest plans for development of a moonbase
showcasing a design developed by Fosters and Partners
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBZopB4356U> that, jumping on the 3D
printing bandwagon, was based on the idea of using a pair of modest robots
to 3D print a hard shell for an inflatable habitat made from fused
regolith. It's a fairly plausible concept since, despite Fosters'
suggestion of employing 'advanced construction methods', it's actually a
derivative of a very old, well proven, and simple construction method once
used in WWII by German military engineers to build bunkers and underground
bomb-resistant aircraft hangars and which has quite often been suggested a
the basis of Lunar and Mars base construction. Known as mound-formed shell
construction, it uses sculpted mounds of gravel with reinforcement placed
over them as a form over which a relatively dry concrete is layered. Once
the shell has cured, it is covered in earth and the gravel is excavated
from the hollow shell to be reused in further construction. A very
interesting park in Fukuoka Japan called Grin-Grin Park
<
http://architecturalmoleskine.blogspot.com/2013/03/toyo-ito-grin-grin-park-fukuoka.html>
features
this very type of construction and I often refer to it as a plausible
visual analog of future space settlements. Many variations of this
technique have been proposed for space use since the 1960s. SuperAdobe
inventor Nader Khalili once proposed the use of solar thermal fusion in a
variation of the ancient Persian technique of fired adobe construction.

The interesting thing about this building technique is that it's really so
simple right now a group of hobbyists or students could go buy a bunch of
those RC construction models right off the shelf and demonstrate, full
scale, this moonbase construction using them. Though they wouldn't be quite
as efficient as more purpose-designed robots, they could probably
accomplish this in about the same time as projected for the Fosters
design--roughly half a year. Given that the 1/8th scale construction models
are about the same size as the robots proposed, repurposing the components
from these models for more efficient purpose-built systems would be
straightforward. Ideally, one would want a better teleoperation analog than
having a bunch of people standing around with RC transmitters and so a new
WiFi based first-person video and control platform would be preferred
allowing long distance cooperative control by PC over the internet. This is
all perfectly feasible. It could be started in a week.

Strangely, despite the relative ease and economy of such a demonstration,
for a year now ESA has made no attempt to do this. No one in the space
establishment is proposing anything like this. Could such a project be the
new TMRC? A potentially vastly larger, global access, TMRC? For a long time
I've been proposing the idea of an open source space program based on
telebase development, but few people seem to have been able to comprehend
what I was talking about. I keep referring to it as "the best community
model train layout ever--the kind you might one day move into" but no one
gets it. Here, however, is a project that could very plainly illustrate the
concept. A specific, cooperative, physical building project that a team of
amateur telerobots and their builders could actually build and, through
that, refine their technology. A direct way to personally participate in
real space development activity. And this is just one of a large host of
space analog structures that could be explored using similar facilities
right here on Earth, indoors and out, local and remote. There are orbital
platforms based on space frames, enclosed orbital labs, open and enclosed
surface habitats, excavated habitats, and so on. There are many kinds of
tele-construction and in-situ resource utilization concepts to explore. The
Earth offers even more challenging environments like the open ocean or the
sea floor, forests, caves, hot springs and volcanoes, the poles. There are
all kinds of interesting design and engineering problems on offer here. And
best of all, it could be a hell of a lot of fun. But is anyone else
interested? Is there a way to get to critical mass? Those RC model shows
often have many companies sponsoring them--often the same vehicle
manufacturers represented by the models on display. Why wouldn't those some
construction machine companies be interested in this?

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----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com> -----

Date: Thu, 19 May 2016 19:04:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
To: Open Manufacturing <openmanufacturing at googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Open Manufacturing] Re: Telebase Alpha

Thinking more about how to get started with this. Step one would seem to be
to identify some likely control hardware and software. As it turns out,
there's a variety of RC-over-WiFi/IP hardware available off-the-shelf and
cheap now whose development has been driven by people wanting to use their
smartphones and tablets as RC transmitters. These are small and designed as
drop-in replacements for conventional RC receivers and so will suit most
off-the-shelf models.There are also some RC-over-IP tool kits for Arduinos
<http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/RCKit/> using WiFi shields, and
probably comparable toolkits for the other popular microcontrollers. These
are based on smartphone/tablet apps that simulate a simple conventional RC
transmitter user interface with a couple of virtual joysticks. We need to
support more sophisticated workstations able to combine multiple
controllers (as a single robot may have multiple controllers), video
displays, and telemetry displays and switch them as grouped workstation
sets between different robots and other base hardware. We might also want
to support some of the same kind of control panels used with flight
simulator programs. I suspect this has been done before with Linux
workstations--I would be very surprised if it hasn't, but maybe it hasn't
been done over IP. But if at first we would have to make do with a
'workstation' composed of a set of modest cost tablets that might be OK. It
might just be a hassle to switch them between different robots.

We would also need to figure out if this can be run in a mesh network
environment as an 'in the field' telebase is most-likely to employ mesh
networking using deployable 'trail marker' transponders. Not much of a
concern at the start as an initial setup is most-likely going to be
indoors.

Power is an important concern if we're doing everything by remote control.
It's the biggest logistical issue for a telebase. On-board solar power is a
possibility but if a prototype is done indoors this may not be too
effective. I expected this to be problematic, but it seems many amateur
robot builders have been experimenting with near field wireless charging
enough that off-the-shelf wireless charging hardware is commonly found in
current robot parts catalogs. A few, smaller, off-the-shelf RC models are
now adopting this as well. There are also a variety of wireless chargers
for cell phones that could be hacked. So a more-or-less standardized
solution for this could be possible. There may still be an issue with
charging the high-power LiPoly batteries now common for larger or more high
performance RC models. Also, direct cabling is not unusual in the full
scale mining and construction field, which has been on a long trend of
transitioning to electric power. It may be quite practical to have robots
operating on tethers where their range of movement is relatively modest.
But reliable quick-connect in a relatively dirty environment would be a
challenge.

The Fosters moonbase concept is rather over-simplistic, at least in
illustration, and seems to assume that lunar regolith is much more uniform
and homogenous than is likely, thus allowing for a single kind of robot to
assume both material gathering and deposition functions. In practice, it is
likely that considerable site preparation will be necessary and there will
need to be some dedicated facility for the collection and screening of
regolith in large volume akin to that commonly used in terrestrial
landscape work. The use of an inflatable dome as a form potentially reduces
the construction time compared to screening and piling up a gravel mound
form, but in gathering a suitable volume of uniform shell material one
would be simultaneously separating and collecting this gravel sized
material, the ratios of granular sizes varying widely with location. This
inflatable dome must also survive, fully exposed, for the duration of the
construction process, demanding a multilayer Whipple-shield like structure
akin to the semi-rigid TransHab module hull. Thus a much heavier, less
compactable, dome envelope would be needed with this approach than would be
needed for a system where the envelope was deployed within a pre-fabricated
shell. So it's difficult to suggest any particular advantage to an
inflatable form over the much simpler mound form.

A formless approach is also feasible with a radial boom crane based
deposition mechanism and has been proposed for lunar construction in the
past, but would require a very fine and uniform shell material, possibly
using a gas or liquid transport method, deposited in very thin layers that
may not be possible without a significant local refinery process.

The Fosters concept doesn't get into any details on the nature of the
'printing' process used in shell construction. It appears that it is based
on fluid deposition of a binding agent into thin regolith layers--much like
the polyjet 3D printing process. I imagine some exotic epoxy. Mound formed
shell construction usually employs a dry but convention cement based
concrete mix, which could be fine in demonstration but is a little messy to
deal with for small machines. This is usually a material intended for large
volumes applied very quickly rather than built-up in many thin layers. An
analogous oxidizing liquid binder could be explored or perhaps an
off-the-shelf geopolymer which can be mixed in small batches and applied in
very liquid form. This would still be the messiest and least reliable part
of the building process. In the past, methods of regolith construction have
proposed vitrifying regolith in situ, sometimes using solar energy, but the
amount of energy needed to accomplish this is very high. A variety of lunar
regolith simulant materials have been developed, but are not produced in
quantity sufficient to be affordable in the volumes this project would
requires and so we would likely have to go with something that is more of a
physical than chemical simulation. This probably doesn't need to be too
close an analog or terribly strong to adequately demonstrate the
construction process.

The use of ISS-style cupolas in the Fosters dome design doesn't make much
sense. It defeats the purpose of the radiation shielding of the regolith
shell, creates a lot of failure points, and would not be an efficient
lighting system. It is much more likely that such habitats would rely
either on electric lighting alone or the use of fiber optic lighting with
easily positioned and replaceable modular heliostat array collectors and
fiber cables to bring light in through the bulkhead entrances.


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----- Forwarded message from Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com> -----

Date: Wed, 25 May 2016 17:09:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
To: Open Manufacturing <openmanufacturing at googlegroups.com>
Subject: [Open Manufacturing] Re: Telebase Alpha

Thinking some more about this idea and what sort of robot designs might be
used. I've been considering which of the RC construction vehicle
types/parts would offer the most potential 'hackability' for robot
adaptation. Construction/excavation machine designs have tended to be
rather specialized. But one type stands out as, potentially, the most
versatile or multi-functional; the crawler excavator. The crawler seems to
be the one drive platform used in the most variations of construction
equipment, employed where surfaces are unstable and maximum traction and
wide distribution of vehicle loads are desired. The crawler excavator form
of this is interesting in that it's swiveling crawler base is used by some
equipment companies, largely unchanged, in a number of different machines.
The same chassis used for a bucket excavator may also be used for what is
called a 'swivel crawler dumper', often using the very same kind of
operator cabin. This video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2u0aaTOykQ>
shows these machines side-by-side. This may also be used for cranes, cargo
handling with a small loading crane, and to host all sorts of other
equipment. The crawler is also used in a kind of landscape sculpting role
on ski slopes where a winch is employed to support the vehicle
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abvkRTjH9uo> traversing steep slopes as it
sculpts them. Here we can see the same mechanism being used for earth
sculpting. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C_Q205umDw> This mechanism has
been reproduced in scale models
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnFqvavlk1k> and could be a useful tool in
the shaping of a gravel mound form. These crawler chassis can also be
ganged to support long or wide platforms or long articulated chains, like
LeTourneau
Trains
<http://www.autoblog.net.br/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/overland-train-4.jpg
>,
though that would be more efficient with wheeled vehicles.

The form-factor of these crawlers is such that adapting them to
robots--whether as scale models or full-scale machines, would be as simple
as replacing the operator cabin with an electronics enclosure and adding a
'radar arch' to host lights, sensors, and cameras. In the nautical world a
radar or communications arch, also called a boat tower, is a simple space
frame arch
<
https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com/7dc9caed/dms3rep/multi/mobile/pict0541-600x450.JPG>
suspended
over the deck or pilot cabin/station of a boat used to host radar units,
lights, satellite, and radio equipment. On fishing charter boats these are
also used to hold fishing rods and a high lofted pilot station for 'sight
fishing' (using height to avoid glare and spot fish by sight) while other
boats use them to support towlines for water skiing. For robots one would
want to employ a frame with many equipment mounting options so T-slot or
holed tubular profiles are likely.

The compromise of the crawler is that it's very slow and unsuited to long
distance travel. When doing real scale construction with small robots this
is an important consideration. It also has a large number of parts, and
thus needs more maintenance. It is likely one would need additional wheeled
vehicles or possibly the use of rail systems, like a deployable banana
monorail <https://www.earth.ac.cr/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/20-Foto7.jpg>,
to support the longer distance transport of materials. Wheeled excavators
are common and offer similar potential versatility from their chassis,
though this is not commonly exploited in construction equipment design,
perhaps because it's considered redundant to existing conventional wheeled
vehicle designs. The wheeled excavator is much more mobile and faster, but
requires more maneuvering room and a much more stable, level, surface to
traverse. When excavating, they deploy a narrow dozer blade and outrigger
stabilizers, requiring a flat resting area. In the past decade, a new class
of wheeled excavator has emerged called 'walking' or 'spider' excavators
that use independent steered pneumatically powered wheels on the ends of
articulated legs. This allows for traversing extreme terrain, performing
elaborate maneuvers, and level operation on steep slopes and is very useful
in shallow water and swampy locations. It's also based on very minimalist
base chassis like the crawlers and so could suit the same large variety of
applications. There have been some experiments in modeling these with Lego,
but I haven't yet seen off-the-shelf RC models, possibly because this drive
system remains a bit difficult to replicate in miniature. But it's, no
doubt, on the way and this could offer a superior alternative to the
crawler. Certainly, a number of large scale space robot designs already
employ systems like this.


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