All the buzzwords in one place
An article discussing "autonomous drone swarm manufacturing" showed up in my Mastodon feed this morning. Intrigued, I went down the rabbit hole, for this is truly some buzzword soup.
The hole wasn't as deep as I had imagined. At the bottom, I was pleased to find a project I had bumped into a few times -- H2Clipper. H2Clipper was (and apparently is once again) an airship project. The airship part of the business has been reimagined from people transport to heavy transshipment as part of a Hydrogen delivery scheme. Apparently the idea is that you generate your Hydrogen somewhere far away from the commercial centers that need it. Once you've got a bunch of H2 you need delivered, you summon an airship and voila, your Hydrogen is ferried off to a waiting purchaser at 175mph.
Rinaldo Brutoco, futurist and chairman and CEO of H2Clipper, in this piece for Robot Report, floats the idea of autonomous swarm manufacturing. This is some forward looking shit, people!
It seems that the advent of autonomous swarms of robot manufacturing drones was inevitable. First, it was the swarmy Chinese drone light shows that got people's attention, previewing the near future, creepy and awe-inspiring at the same time. Mr Brutoco takes the logical next step to imagine swarms of robots building airships. This is a response to one of the thorny problems of making airships, which would require massive spaces to construct, if built on traditional assembly lines. Instead, H2Clipper's patented approach would have drone swarms building the craft in situ. This is definitely that part of life where the edges of science fiction touch the edges of actuality.
War tech becomes home tech
The proposal appears workable, to my lay person’s eye. We've seen drones evolve quickly. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has done that thing that war tends to do -- push the boundaries of killing technology forward at warp speed. It's pretty clear that future wars are going to be fought by ever larger, ever more lethal drone swarms. As often happens, we can anticipate that drone swarm tech will find its way into everyday, non-warfare theaters.
The H2Clipper people seem to be out in front of that idea, filing patents and getting ready for someone to pass the puck to them, for truly they are skating to where the action will be. It's this part of the what-if game that seems to challenge most people, but apparently not Mr Brutoco. He's pretty clear that drone swarms are a done deal. They are here and they're just going to get bigger and more sophisticated. Given that, what opportunities exist to employ these next-gen drone swarms? Obviously, in his mind, airship manufacturing. I would suggest perhaps that other large-scale engineering efforts too, could similarly be jump started or accelerated.
It's his second-order thinking that has got me intrigued. People seem to struggle with second-order thinking, tending to focus on first-order outcomes. Perhaps it's because it's much easier to look a single day into the future, to plot out that simple next step instead of assuming that the next step is going to take place regardless, and asking then what might the step after that look like?
I've tried to have this discussion with folks relating to EVs and renewable energy. What if we just take it as read that we'll all drive EVs in five years' time and we'll all have solar panels on our roofs by then? Would we have a sudden swing to energy surplus? If you understand the primary energy problem, and you agree that solar panels will be ubiquitous, then you should be on board with the idea that we're headed to energy surplus. If you agree that we're going to have a surfeit of energy, what then? Could we too, skate to where the puck will be? Could we look just a little further into the future, armed with the certainty that there will be excess energy?
You can’t have too much of something, until you can
This idea of energy surplus is not difficult to get to. Consider that there are several things in modern society that are reasonably easy to forecast. Take the evolution of the multi-blade razor for example. The first disposable double-edged razor was patented in 1901 by King C. Gillette. It took a while to get to cartridges and multiple blades -- the first twin-blade cartridge razor was the Gilette Trac II in 1971. Then, in the 90's we got the three-bladed Gillette Mach 3 (1998), the four-bladed Schick Quattro (2003) and finally, the five-bladed Gillette Fusion in 2006. The quest for ever more blades appears to have abated, for the moment, peaking with 6-blade knives from Dorco and PureSilk and others.
Similarly, the venerable TiVo series 1 (1999) had one tuner. While the ability to record TV was amazing, it was mildly annoying to not be able to record more than one show at a time. It wasn't long (2002) before 2-tuner DVRs showed up. After a period of quiet, 4-tuner models appeared around 2011. Soon, it was 6 tuners (2013) and later (2015), the Dish Hopper 3 showed up with 16 tuners! The Dish Hopper remains the undisputed king of tuner count, and it seems that the need for more tuners has been met.
Side note: Aereo was a project where a New York startup tried to remove the tuner count constraint altogether. [7]
In both the razor blade and DVR examples, we see products evolving rapidly into a space of unmet need (more blades better, more tuners better) followed by a plateauing of expansion when the point of satiation is met. We don't need more than five blades, really, and six or seven blades start to make razor cartridges physically unwieldy. Similarly, we reach the 13-channels-of-shit [1] limit after six tuners, more or less.
In 1998, it quickly became clear that we were entering a razorblade arms race, and the blade_count+1 phenomenon seemed inevitable. So too, with tuners in the early 2000s. Today's world is filled with trends that are trivially forecastable, because they're just like the blades and tuners phenomenon - a thing emerges, followed shortly by a slightly bigger, or longer thing. It becomes clear that bigger or longer things are going to keep appearing, until they've reached some upper bound of practicality. One might look to the emergence of very large SUVs as an example of "just keep making it bigger" -- the Suburban or the Yukon or the Hummer are examples of the practical upper bound of passenger vehicle size. Any bigger and they wouldn't fit into a parking space [2].
Could we ever have have too much energy?
EVs are one place where there's an easily predicted arc in two dimensions: range and charging speed. Range will increase until it no longer matters, which will likely be somewhere around 500 miles [3]. Charging times will fall until there's practically no difference between refilling a gas car and recharging an EV. The Chinese appear to be homing in on a target charging time of around ten minutes, which is probably the practical threshold below which additional investment in charging speeds produces diminishing returns.
The installation of solar panels and batteries is another arc we can look to with strong confidence. By 2035, virtually every home will have solar panels installed, mostly likely with batteries to support storage [4]. It's just too easy -- the panels are cheap and the benefits obvious. Similarly, batteries are travelling that scaling curve as the production learning phenomenon makes each generation cheaper than the last.
Lastly, appliances. Electrical appliances are relatively simple beasts, designed for operation where the wall plug is something you turn on like a spigot, with unlimited supply. Because this is a deceptive design simplification, the assumption of "as much electricity as you need, whenever you need it" is a standard starting point for appliance designers. Indeed, why bother accounting for variable supply if that's a vanishingly small probability? In disaster recovery planning, we focus on the foreseeable risks, with higher probabilities. It's very unlikely that customers will need appliances that elegantly handle variable supply of electricity, so why build in that kind of capability? What would an appliance even look like that was able to operate in an environment where the power supply was inconsistent or otherwise variable?
Very few people are designing homes capable of withstanding large meteor strikes, but most [5] are designed with flood defenses in mind. Appliance designers, at least until now, haven't been too worried about the electricity supply part of their products. In the near future however, we can expect appliances to be more aware of their power usage, perhaps even to the extent of having their own batteries to boost or smooth or otherwise condition the supply of power. This trend is most obvious in some of the new induction ranges which have batteries built in [6], to provide power boosts for cooking functions that ranges haven't previously been able to provide, such as instant temperature boost.
In the renewable energy space, we are entering a time where new thinking is needed, where forward vision can help us get to the future more quickly. If we can agree that there will be plenty of energy, perhaps then we could make CO2-sucking-machines that run day and night?
The H2Clipper people are looking beyond the drones-of-war to the drones-of-manufacturing. Similarly, we can look beyond fossil fuels.
It's time for imagination, positivity and vision. Let's stop arguing about solar panels and EVs and renewables, and get on with the next step of modernizing our energy mentality.
[1] In Nobody Home, by Pink Floyd, Roger Waters (voicing the Pink character) bemoans the surfeit of TV channels with nothing worth watching. (https://thewallanalysis.com/nobody-home/). In the same way, recording six channels simultaneously produces a massive volume of viewing material, but how much is actually worth watching?
[2] Yes, they already don't fit, for all intents and purposes, but for this discussion, we'll pretend that they do.
[3] Our Camry has roughly 450 miles of range. This is more than enough for any realistic travel. For a while we were driving to Cleveland from NY, a distance of approximately 475 miles and a travel time of approximately seven and a half hours. Even if the car had the range to go the whole way on one tank, people have to take bathroom breaks, they have to eat and they get tired. We had to stop roughly a minumum of two times on that trip, and that wasn't enough for safety. We should have been stopping three or more times. So, the Camry would have gotten us most of the way there, but the limiting factor wasn't the car's range, it was our endurance capacity. When we see "I do long distance driving and I need a range of 500 miles" as an objection to having an EV, when EVs can do 500 miles, all those people will be able to rush out and trade in the stinkpots for clean vehicles. Lol of course they won't -- the distance objection is just a straw man, but the point here is that the 500 mile threshold is the same as a five-bladed razor or a six-tuner DVR -- sufficient for all practical purposes.
[4] It's possible that the battery in your EV parked in the garage will serve this purpose, but IMO, it is more likely that we will see storage specifically aimed at running the house, while the car will take on a grid-augmentation role.
[5] Most new houses that is. Again, also, generalizing for the purposes of the discussion. Yes, homes on desert hilltops aren't designed for flooding.
[6] https://copperhome.com/products/charlie
[7] Aereo installed hundreds of tuners in a comms room and allowed subscribers to remotely control what station they were watching, effectively providing an unbounded upper limit of the number of tuners, but the idea was quickly shelved in the face of vigorous lawsuits brought by powerful media people.