Comment by evrimoztamur
3 days ago
Prevention is not the cure to the tragedy of the commons, we always need to be able to react. I don't pour oil down my drain, but the rest of the building does, which is how my six-meter wire won't do jack.
A laboratory environment which is devoid of any resemblance to the real world will yield you different results compared to had you designed and built first for the environments you will encounter, would you agree? And these results could have capabilities not transferrable between different environments.
I try to raise these questions in good faith: For example, are wheels the way to go at all for filthy pipe environments with many sticky and tangly hazards, or do we perhaps have to explore more snake/worm form factors? If we design for the clean environments, all the magical "cost savings for infrastructure restoration" accounting you can do will never materialize.
You are right, in the filthiest environments nothing else can be as performant as a worm/snake-like robot, even if such robots are inferior to those with wheels or rotary propellers in nice tidy environments.
Moreover, instead of making a robot with arms, which are useful for work, but which are an impediment for moving in a filthy environment, it is better to send multiple vermiform robots, which are designed such as after reaching their destination they are able to cooperate in such a way as to act like a robot with multiple arms (i.e. they should be able to attach to anything in the environment or to another robot with both the anterior end and the posterior end, like leeches).
This an 'em newfangled "flexible" (ie. "banana") robots are really interesting ...