let make something now!

On Apr 11, 2011, at 4:48 PM, Victor Smith wrote:

> On 4/6/11 3:07 PM, edpell wrote:
>
> > It is time to use robots to build things on the moon. Like 1) robot
> > shelter under ground 2) PV production 3) oxygen and water
> production 4)
> > a green house with plants. We already use robots to do mining on
> planet
> > Earth. Maybe even beam some power via microwaves back to Earth.
>
> As appealing an idea that is, the biggest problem is we don't have
> robotic systems capable of doing such yet. More specifically the
> A.I. type. And because of the time delay, still only a couple of
> seconds but still enough to make remote operation not practical
> either.

This is not the case. There are terrestrial mines that are operated
remotely with delays as long or longer (I think around 10-15 seconds)
than the unavoidable moon delays. There was a mining automation guy
(Greg Baiden, Laurentian University; Penguin Automated Systems) at the
last Space Studies Institute that implemented one such system in use
today. It's pretty much routine.

Less definitive, I ran some simulator experiments many moons ago that
indicated that a three second delay really isn't much of a problem for
driving stuff around. See "Remote Teleoperation Earth to Moon - An
Experiment," Fifth Princeton/AIAA Conference on Space Manufacturing,
1981. Sorry, was done so long ago there is no web version.