Buck Rogers

We all used to chuckle at the robots depicted on television sci-fi shows. Buck Rogers’ sidekick, Twiki (”A-beedy-beedy-beedy-beedy… Nice going, Buck!”), and Daggit the robot dog on Battlestar Galactica. These were outcroppings of C3PO and R2D2, who in a twisted kind of way were descendents of the positively hilarious Robot from Lost In Space.

Kids were led to believe that this was the future we had to look forward to. Well kids, we’re close…

As soon as my teenager heads off to college I’m getting one of those robots that will mow my lawn. I have also promised my wife a “Roomba” robotic vacuum cleaner as soon as the budget will allow it. Those, plus an army of cute but ultimately just entertaining robot dogs, are the ways that robots are touching our lives today. That is about to change.

Hop on YouTube.com and check out the cute (ha!) little toy Boston Dynamics has in prototype form nicknamed ‘Big Dog’. It’s a four-legged, autonomous robot that can climb hills; navigate snow, ice, sand, gravel, and uneven rock surfaces; hop over reasonably-sized obstacles and chasms; and do all of this with a payload of over 300 pounds. It has self-leveling gyroscope (I assume) technology such that when you roundhouse kick the thing, it stumbles in reaction to the force, but then regains its balance (!!!) and keeps on heading towards its intended destination.

There is ‘Little Dog’ too, a less impressive but still worthy descendent. There is additional video of a scorpion-like device about a foot across that climbs smooth vertical surfaces. Hello…

In real-world (actually, extra-terrestrial) action at this moment is Dextre, a robot that now lives on the exterior shell of the International Space Stations. Those crazy Canadians who brought us the robotic arm that is used in the Space Shuttle cargo bay developed this little sucker, who after a small power problem was resolved, was put through its paces just days ago by the Endeavor crew who delivered him to his new home orbiting the earth. There he will live, carefully crawling around the outside of the Station, at first assisting astronauts performing space walks.

But the day will come when he and perhaps some yet-to-be-delivered robotic colleagues can perform safety checks and routine maintenance on the Station. This will all but eliminate the need for dangerous, time-consuming, and expensive space walks using living, breathing astronauts. Depending Dextre’s success at such duties, he may see the list of tasks performed by him and his brethren expanded in the future.

And that’s why advances like this are important. It’s not the first step that you can see that is mesmerizing, it’s the next ninety-nine that you can’t see.

Take Big Dog. Right now this is a robotic mule. It was developed with a grant from the Defense Department, so Big Dog itself will see use as a way to haul heavy equipment and supplies into remote areas quietly. To get an artillery unit onto the side of a mountain with a 30-degree slope: nine guys with a dozen Big Dogs set off at dusk, and by morning you have an emplacement that takes some Taliban outpost completely by surprise. Additional uses could be search and rescue, counter-terrorism, bomb retrieval and neutralization, and just plain old hauling stuff over rough terrain. Plus, arm the thing and give it some “vision”, and you’ve got a pretty bad-ass way to clear a house of bad guys without endangering soldiers or police.

But then think non-military. We have the Segway which balances on two wheels when powered up; Big Dog could be turned into a two-legged device very easily. So then that raises the possibility of it becoming a very practical, very functional set of legs for a double-amputee. Miniaturize the thing to a unit 8 inches tall and it becomes something very useful in small mine shafts, particularly in emergencies. I’m sure if I sat here for more than thirty seconds I could come up with a dozen of them.

And what about Dextre? Well, we are approaching the day when the Space Elevator will be a reality. See my related post on that topic here. So when you have the ability to move large amounts of cargo to low-earth orbit, what do you do with it? Well, you have to field a team of space-walking human workers to move it, inventory it, and put it to some use. But if you have a team of Dextres instead, that team of human workers becomes reduced to a few operators and supervisors. The robots can retrieve and inventory your supplies, then scramble over whatever structure you’re building, performing perhaps a single task before moving on, just like assembly line workers, free of the constraints of environment suits or oxygen supplies. The work goes faster, cheaper, and safer.

That scorpion thing that scales vertical surfaces? I envision a team of window-washing scorpions living on the side of skyscrapers and running on a constant schedule (except when it rains). Or else single-seat rescue vehicles dispatched during a high-rise fire to get people out of the building safely. Scale the building, find an open window (or smash one out), take on one person and lower them to the ground with a retractable basket on heavy-duty cables. Then yank the basket back up and go again until everyone is down, then go to another floor.

Once the physical limitations are breached, once the scaling or balancing or crawling has been achieved, the tasks these critters perform are butt-simple computer programming. Those limitations are about to go bye-bye, which means you will be seeing commercial applications appear very soon. As with any technology, when mass production is engaged prices will come down. So I fully expect to see some of these neat little gadgets influencing our lives before I log out for good. Certainly my kids will.

Just remember, there was a day when everyone thought it was impossible to have a phone that you carried around in your pocket and would work anywhere you went. Now look at us. Buck Rogers, indeed.

Future Commute

I commuted from my quite-distant-suburban home to a major downtown area for more than five years, and as it turns out, am about to start another stint doing exactly the same thing. My commute routine is a four mile drive from home to train, an hour-long (forty-mile as the crow flies) train ride, and (luckily) a fifty foot walk from train station to the front door of my office building.

With the exception of the fifty-foot walk, I would call this commute relatively typical. My fellow commuters’ drive from home to the train station is either shorter or longer than mine, and when they get downtown almost all of them go farther to get to their place of work. For some of them that means a walk of a few blocks, some of them catch a bus, others take taxis.

All of this saves us the brutal, daily task of fighting aneurism-inducing traffic jams at both the beginning and end of our day. Additionally there is some measure of environmental benefit, with about one hundred soot-spewing locomotives taking the place of thirty or forty thousand CO2-belching automobiles.

And I have to tell you, despite my cushy circumstances, there has to be a better way. Let’s walk through the down-side to this.

I get out of my house and drive to the train station, where the problem becomes parking. At my station there is a two-year waiting list for a quarterly parking pass, and pay-by-day parking (last I checked) was full by 6:10am — nearly two hours before my train pulls out. So I’m reduced to parking in a time-restricted spot and having my wife move my car to a local/free/no-time-limit lot after 9am. Not exactly optimum, and a problem shared by more than a few other commuters.

Next is the train itself. For some reason the train schedule gets me downtown either much earlier than I need to be, or just after I need to be. So I either have to drag my butt out of bed earlier than necessary, or be late. Then there’s the train being thirty seconds early and missing it, or 90 minutes late and having to either work from home or call the boss with the barely-believable train-was-late-again excuse.

Now, I am not the most pleasant human being to be around. I tend to be touchy and opinionated, and rather intolerant of my fellow man. That being said, I’m sure I’m not the only one that would prefer my *own* seat in whatever vehicle is transporting me, well, anywhere. My disdain for my fellow man notwithstanding, I’m somewhat of a big guy, and I tend to feel cramped when forced to share a bench with even normal sized people, and I’m pretty sure they do too.

Finally, the biggee: what to do when you get to your destination. Trains stop at train stations. Very few, if any, people who commute downtown actually *work* at train stations. That means pretty much everybody is faced with some kind of dilemma in getting to their ultimate destination. The public transit system is designed to try to help the most people in the best way, but it can’t be all things to all people. Many thousands of people are stuck with extending their commute by bus or by cab once they get off the train. Still thousands more are on foot, a breezy, sun-drenched delight for three months of the year here in Chicago, but either a sweat-bathed mess or a rain/sleet/snow-covered trudge during the remaining nine months.

And that’s just the ride in: the whole process is reversed at the end of the day.

I think there is a better way to do this. More efficient, more energy-wise, and alleviating most of the problems that plague this process. Of course it will require some serious changes.

*     *     *     *     *

Here’s the upside. No gas expense driving to or from the train. No more missing the train. No parking at the train station. A full-featured and comfortable environment to take you all the way from your house to your destination. No bus or cab or walking on the destination side. Zero emissions and partial use of renewable resources for the entire commute end-to-end. And most of this uses existing technology.

The down-side? Retro-fitting our existing infrastructure and equipment production/acquisition are going to be expensive.

Here’s the vision. You start out at your house by unplugging your electric vehicle and climbing aboard. This is a four-wheeled vehicle much like a car, in fact for your purposes it *is* a car, with all the amenities and even a couple more that cars today don’t have.

Now, this car isn’t big. Probably two seats at most. Not a lot of storage either. It’s a commuter vehicle, made for short trips, range of probably fifty miles on a full charge. It’s road-ready, meets all the safety regulations for government approval, including seat belts and air bags and all that. Like I say, when you pull out of your driveway, this is a car. It just does some tricks.

So you drive from your house to where you catch the train. Here’s where things get funky. Your “car” doubles as your personal coach on a magnetic monorail system that uses the same technology as the Japanese bullet-trains. It can drive right up to an on-ramp, link in to the system, and be carried along that monorail to your intended destination. When it travels on that system it uses the energy from the monorail to power itself, and in fact its batteries are re-charged while it runs along. Plus, no parking, no running to the train, no missing the train, no train being late, or any of that mess.

Additionally, since you’re now taking your personal vehicle on the trip downtown, all of the amenities you have built into your vehicle stay with you for the trip. Your chair, your stereo, your personal space to enjoy for the journey. No obnoxious cell phone guy with too much cologne cramming himself and his oversized leather portfolio in next to you. Just you traveling in temperature-controlled comfort right from your garage to your destination. Plus, I know I like to work on my laptop during the commute. We could build in high-speed internet connectivity to the monorail system with ease, as well as high-reliability cell phone network availability, essentially turning your vehicle into a full-featured office for the trip.

Also, with the monorail system we can add some new elements to this commute process. Fifty thousand single vehicles traveling on the same system tends to get messy, consolidation is a better idea. For that reason, these cars link together to form a train of sorts. The more cars in the train, the more electrically efficient it is to whisk that train to its destination. So we could build a feature into the system that speed and track availability were determined by the number of cars in your train. Get 20 of your friends who all go downtown at roughly the same time, and you blast past almost everybody. Go it alone, and you get stuck in the “slow lane.” But you could pull into stations along the way to pick up singles from those stops and try to get moving faster. Transportational Darwinism, if you will.

Power source? Well, there’s little question that this puppy will soak up a mammoth amount of electricity. But I also envision this monorail system existing, for the most part, above the existing train tracks. That means lots of large support towers holding the monorails in place. All of those towers can be put to use as either solar-gathering pillars or wind-turbine mounts, feeding clean, renewable energy into the system at all points of the monorail and reducing the overall amount of grid electricity that the system would need.

So now you’ve blasted your way downtown listening to Barbra Streisand, updating your MySpace page, and assuring your boss that you sent that budget projection to him yesterday: now what? Well, you’re in your car with a full electric charge. Drive to work! The small and modular nature of the vehicle you are in makes parking a new and a little futuristic experience. Pull up to the parking garage, hook into the system, get out and grab your stuff, put in your money and get your ID card. The system grabs your vehicle and lifts it up to wherever there is space available. “Stacks” it, if you will. When you are ready for your car, go back to the kiosk and stick in your ID card, your car is lifted down to you, you get in and drive back to the train station. And don’t worry, there will be dozens of pick-up/drop-off points at each garage with perhaps hundreds of independent and redundant delivery and retrieval systems built in, so there is no danger of getting your car stuck 9 stories up where you can’t get to it.

From there, it’s back to the monorail, hook up with fellow commuters who are going to your destination, and whoosh! You’re back where you started from. But wait, what if you have to go somewhere else today? Or you have to leave unexpectedly? Or you have to go to a business lunch? Or a business dinner? Or drive to the airport? You have your car: drive! One annoying thing about commuting is that if you ever deviate from your daily pattern, you’re fighting traffic in your car all the way downtown and taking out a sub-prime mortgage to pay for parking. With this concept, literally anyone can use public transportation. It becomes so much more usable, convenient, and efficient.

*     *     *     *     *

That’s it in a nutshell. Like I said, not easy to implement. Our cities have a huge investment in the existing infrastructure, changing that would be difficult. However, the beginning of this concept is already on the drawing board. The ever-studious boys and girls at MIT have drawn up plans for a commuter car that can be stacked with other similar vehicles.

And while it is absurd to think that this could be implemented here in the U.S., a strange thing is happening in China. The population growth coupled with the economic boom in that country is causing the government to build cities. I don’t mean building up an existing town, I mean picking a spot on the map with nothing and saying, “Okay, build it here,” and breaking ground. An entire city, aimed at housing and employing a quarter million people or more, built up from scratch. My concept would be a perfect addition to such a project.

Who knows, maybe they’re already Naughty disciples…