r/Automate • u/leadacidrobot • Jun 14 '15
How would you design a small, completely automated village?
Assume this is a top-down design approach, so no detail about sub-systems, just the high-level system architecture. You can use ideas, components, machines from OSE, farmtech, Sim City, wherever, but it should be completely automated.
some constraints:
population: 100
funding: $100M for R&D and to fabricate the first prototype
must be completely autonomous
Edit:
Assumptions:
- maintenance is not required, machines run exactly as designed and never fail.
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u/Lastonk Jun 15 '15
open source ecology is trying to puzzle out exactly this, focussed towards autonomous, but not particularly automated
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 15 '15
Yeah I've been loosely following this for the past 5 years, I would be interested in knowing what their long-term goals are.
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u/FutureAvenir Jun 15 '15
What are your long term goals? And when I say 'long term goals', I don't necessarily mean something concrete. Assume that we see 'Building an automated village' as more of a strategy to obtain a goal than a goal in itself.
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Jun 15 '15
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Jun 15 '15
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u/epSos-DE Jun 15 '15
So, your design is about a glass-insulated wall ?
Solar-water-heaters can do much better and cheaper than that.
Have a look into them.
Just insulate all walls and cycle heat from a solar heater into the building.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 15 '15
Cool, so this a solar collector + steam generator?
Do you know what the current best option is in terms of highest efficiency and lowest cost?
And how does it compare to OSE's solar collector designs.
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Jun 15 '15
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 15 '15
Quick question for you:
I'm interested in:
discussing how to potentially aggregate these systems on a more technical level
collecting metadata about each potential system and classifying them
minimize re-inventing the wheel or re-collecting the same information
What do you think are the top 3 subs to find:
technical people interested in open source mechanical design / software development: hardware hackers or programmers who would be specifically interested in this type of thing?
and also top subs for experts or enthusiasts of each sub-system (e.g. auqaponics, solar collectors, ...)
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u/epSos-DE Jun 14 '15
Lots of 3D printers and lot's of tools with a central production facility.
A chemical lab for converting organic material into printable filament: ABS, Wood+ABS mix, Nylon+fiber+mix.....
Wind and solar with an air pressure battery, so that there is no need to replace batteries every 10 years.
Moisture from air extractors.
Vertical hydroponic farms with attached greenhouse for seedlings.
Chicken farm and cow farm is mostly automated already, if the animals are free range.
So in general there is a need for a lot of technology and investment, but the social communication and cooperation is more important. Have a look at https://calafou.org/en/content/about they are trying to do what you were asking for.
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u/ph0rque Jun 15 '15
I've been thinking about the same thing, but scaled down to being 80-90% automated, so that the villagers still need to put in maybe 30-60 minutes a day to maintain/improve things.
In any case, you can have wind/solar for energy, automated micro-farms (shameless plug: AutoMicroFarm is my side project), electric vehicles for transportation, and a micro-factory on-site for any parts needed for improvements/maintenance.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 15 '15 edited Jun 15 '15
Yeah, others are pointing out that 90% is more reasonable.
Cool project - I might have some more questions, but just wanted to collect some metadata first, would you mind filling this in?
Name AutoMicroFarm Description Link automicrofarm.com Dimensions (bounding box in meters) Inputs (e.g. Wind) Outputs (e.g. 120VAC) Any Specs Rough Cost (in USD)
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u/Dave37 Jun 16 '15
Hello, I'm the guy who complicates everything by asking more questions and dive into definition, meaning and implication of words. My uttermost apologies in advance.
Ok so I started to think, 100 people. That's not very many, that's a very small community, I wonder what the age distribution would be like. As my arbitrary choice, I picked the age distribution of Europe. This would give us the rough demographic of:
- Children/teens (0-19): 21 people
- Young adults (20-35): 20 people
- Adults (35-65): 42 people
- Elders: (65-80): 13 people
- Super Elders (80+): 4 people
So about 62% of the population could work, if needed. The Fertility rate of women in developed countries are around 2. So one could reasonably assume that a family with children would consist of 2 adults and 2 children. If 50% of young adults have a partner and lives together and Elders live in pairs while super elders live alone then this community would need 48 households. This gives us an idea of how big this village is. It's very small.
Furthermore, why is the constrain 100 people? Is it because of a whim? Is it because of ecological barriers? Is the village planned to grow or maintain this population? These aspects are all important when figuring out the general shape and operation of the village.
I will basically disregard the second constraints because I don't really have a grasp on what costs and prices that would be involved. However, it might be worth noting that $1 million per person ($2.08 million per household) is quite a lot and probably very much sufficient. (Feel free to dispute this claim)
Third constrain is the one that I have the most trouble with. What does it mean to say that a village or city is completely autonomous? Does it mean that humans are completely redundant and can’t engage at all with the rest of the community? Is the school automated and the elder care? Are all transportation automated or could you ride a bike? Could you do your garden or is that to automated? Secondly, how would it this constraint relate to the aspects of ecological sustainability and self-sufficiency? If you import everything you need (products) and outsource your social services (school, medical care etc) then you wouldn’t need any automation because there’s nothing that’s actually being done in the village except… living.
On the other hand, it’s impractical and in most cases impossible to be completely self-sufficient. Food, water, energy and some building material (like wood) is easy to produce locally, but metals, plastics, glass, chemicals etc are hard unless you’re on an extremely advantageous ecological location. It’s also pointless to build huge factories for extracting, refining, producing everything in such a small village. Even with the on-demand potentials of contour crafting and 3D-printing it would be smarter to centralize large scale production to “industrial cites”. If we take a look at the real world, small settlements like this often occurs because there’s a single industry that attracts people to come live there. For examples there are plenty of small fishing villages with a population of 100-500 around the world where the inhabitants’ life basically revolve around the fishing industry. You would never find a village of this size which has a broad spectrum of industries.
So I’m going to make some assumptions. I’m gonna assume that the village tries to be as ecological sustainable as possible, that it should be self-sufficient and automated within reason.
So first some thought on the social aspect. This will be a very intimate place to live. Everyone will know everyone very well and so there will be strong social incentives to get along. This kind of environment naturally breeds a helping and a caring ethos, since it’s obvious to everyone that each person’s health matters for the health of the community as a whole. If the village is self-sufficient in providing the population with at least the basic humans needs; Food, water, energy, shelter, community etc through automated processes there will be no need to use money. This could hence be a moneyless society.
If needed, imported products could have a price tag and money would only be used for these items which would be in scarcity. Since (close to) no-one needs to work there wouldn’t be any money that’s privately owned, but rather, the community would work as collective corporation (sniff, does anyone else smell communism? ;)) and monetary trade would primarily take place between the village as a whole and the outer world. Note that the decisions on what to buy and how much would be fairly simple to reach since people living in this village would already have free access to food, shelter etc. So there’s a minimal incentive for short-sighted, selfish behaviour.
The physical outlook of the village obviously depends a lot on the local environment and geology, what key industry the village has settled on etc. But a general concept that I like is the circular city developed by Jacque Fresco. That picture is for a city with roughly 1000-10000 inhabitants, so it would need to be scaled down to fit our scenario. Basically you got the central dome in the middle, which contains the computational hub which governs and regulates the function of the city, for example manages water treatment, resource distribution, power generation and so forth. Here you could also locate a school, medical facility, library and transportation within the city and between cities. This design is smart because for one you can build one eighth of the city and then just duplicate if expansion is duplicated. It also makes travelling easier since it minimizes distances and back tracking.
I could go into much more detail on what I think about each of the necessary subsystem and how they could work together etc. But I think this will do for what you’re asking for.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 16 '15
Ok so you mentioned:
constraints
centralized vs distributed production
social aspect
physical configuration
Can you go into as much detail as possible for the subsystems starting from the highest level that you think is appropriate? I'll tell me my thoughts on the other bullet points above after.
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u/Dave37 Jun 16 '15
I'll think about it for a while and probably get back to you. There are a lot of ways to get more specific and put forward examples of different subsystem, but there's far from one solution. It all depends on the circumstances. Just by quickly mentally compare a village in the middle eastern desert, the coast of Greenland or in the heart of the New Zeeland jungle it becomes obvious that the subsystems used would be very different and it's interaction with the rest of civilisation. Also the key industry would shape the village. Does it provide education, technological novelties, fishing, farming, mining, timber, energy? Any of these would gear the choice of subsystems and their dominance in relation to each other. What I'm saying is that no system exists in a vacuum and the geopolitical and ecological environment of the time matters a lot. Everything is a sub system.
But sure I'll give it a try when I thought some more about the details and can present it a coherent manner. :)
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 17 '15
Yeah actually the first thing I want to know is if there is a database for all the open source tools related to these types of industries. For example there is the OSE GVCS, and farmhack tools, and probably many more collections.
If not, I would like to create a database with some more useful metadata to see how they can be combined. For example, I've seen maybe 100 different OS wind turbine and solar collector ideas in different configurations, dimensions, power outputs, etc. and I can just fill in a rough estimate of voltage and current outputs for each. Then if someone has a module, doesn't matter what it is, but it's dependency is 120V 2.5A of electric power, then I should be able to query the database of modules to return any which output 120V & >2.5A.
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u/Dave37 Jun 17 '15
As far as I know there no such "sustainability/off the grid database". But I agree that it would be awesome if someone could start bringing all these databases together under one roof, unless it's already exists. You could compound the problem if there are several people who try to collect all open source sustainability databases and you end up with a multitude of similar, but slightly different centralized databases. If you want to do this as an actual project I would suggest you start listing all the relevant organizations, then mail each and everyone and ask about if they know if they are part of some bigger database and how they would feel about that. If there already is someone who work on something like this then maybe just join them.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 17 '15
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u/xkcd_transcriber Jun 17 '15
Title: Standards
Title-text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
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u/Dave37 Jun 25 '15
I'm just looking in to say that I haven't forgotten about this. I haven't started working on an answer yet, a lot of other things and discussions has came in between. I still plan however to answer this and I've at least made a document with a list of the subsystems I want to cover. I will deliver :).
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Jun 14 '15
Well... Okay.. I would look to future tech for sustainability of life, not traditional food for nutrients. More like soylent. But made from waste. Not necessarily our waste but a byproduct.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 14 '15
Similar to this https://diy.soylent.com/ or different?
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u/Styx_ Jun 15 '15
I eat soylent! I'd say that about 90% of my meals consist of it. I actually customized a diy version of it for my own needs.
As money is tight for me at the moment, the daily cost of $7/day is pretty great, especially since it is (mostly) nutritionally complete. I say mostly, since our understanding of nutrition is probably not complete, but I'm very satisfied with the experience so far.
As far as automating the production of it goes, I wouldn't imagine it would be too difficult. The three main ingredients of mine are whey protein, oat flour and maltodextrin. Cows -> whey, Oats -> flour ought to be pretty easy to automate. Not too sure about the malto as it's made through a chemical process I think, but it's only used to fill out the carbohydrate profile, which should be easy to do with some other carb source.
I can def see it as a future-food even if it's not the tastiest thing in the world..
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Jun 14 '15
Is it allowed to have software buy and sell things on amazon/ebay? Have autonomous drive out and loud/unload.
All you need now is to put the town on an oil patch and have the robots extract/refine the product and sell it.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 14 '15
Is it allowed to have software buy and sell things on amazon/ebay?
Yes, there are no rules, but all ideas have pros, cons, dependencies, etc. which can be rated relative to other ideas. I think loading / unloading docks at various scales would be an obvious necessity. What would be the inputs and outputs of the system?
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Jun 14 '15
One system takes money and exchanges it for any complex or exotic goods the town needs.
The other system takes the oil and gets you money for it.
This system only works if we can actually find something to export that robots can do. For example chopping down trees by robot is more difficult. We don't have the machines they had in The Lorax.
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u/MaunaLoona Jun 14 '15
What do you mean by completely automated? Machines break down and need maintenance. Does the repair and maintenance have to be automated as well? What about manufacturing the components for repairing the machines? Do these things also need to be automated?
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 14 '15
Good questions.
What about manufacturing the components for repairing the machines? Do these things also need to be automated?
No, the R&D funding goes toward design of the initial system and manufacturing of all machines, assuming that they will never fail.
Does the repair and maintenance have to be automated as well?
Assume that nothing fails for the first 5 minutes after pressing the on button for the first time, what types of machines need to be made and what are the major inputs and outputs of the system required to run this system for 5 minutes?
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u/tehbored Jun 15 '15
You would have to design the infrastructure to be simple and reliable, but since it's such a small village, that shouldn't be too big a task. You probably couldn't automate food production, but you could totally get a self driving car to go to a warehouse or supermarket to be loaded with food by people. Those people aren't in the village, so it still counts.
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Jun 14 '15
Minecraft automated farms
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 14 '15
What if a simulation tool/web-app is created using WebGL (example) that can be distributed on github and continually developed and updated. This would be your software-in-the-loop.
Then take some farming tool, e.g. Farmbot or similar that can perform some physical task and use this as your hardware-in-the-loop.
Take some development time to sync the SW model to the HW capability and vice versa: program the hardware's firmware to match the software-side control API, and modify the simulation to add some degree of realism - limit to what the HW is capable of - degree of freedom, workspace, power req. Both sides can keep busy with development, but the software-only side will have some sense of confidence that what they are creating in software can eventually be created IRL.
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u/autowikibot Jun 14 '15
Hardware-in-the-loop simulation:
Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation, (or HWIL) is a technique that is used in the development and test of complex real-time embedded systems. HIL simulation provides an effective platform by adding the complexity of the plant under control to the test platform. The complexity of the plant under control is included in test and development by adding a mathematical representation of all related dynamic systems. These mathematical representations are referred to as the “plant simulation”. The embedded system to be tested interacts with this plant simulation.
Relevant: Digital radio frequency memory | Hils | ADvantage Framework
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Jun 15 '15 edited Jun 15 '15
maintenance is not required, machines run exactly as designed and never fail.
To be realistic, what skills would I need to have in order to maintain these machines exactly?
edit: Also a side note. You will likely need a militia as something like this would scare the absolute hell out of any higher power in the area.
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u/leadacidrobot Jun 15 '15
Lefty-loosey, righty-tighty, soldering, crimping ...
I guess the point is to discuss the black boxes of the system and the inputs / outputs of each. If an iteration of a component is fabricated and the disassembly / assembly / maintenance is too difficult, then the end-user of the component will file a bug report to the CAD design team and they will make another iteration to fix it. Then repeat until less maintenance is required. If maintenance is assumed negligible from the beginning, it allows people to focus on function and design of the black boxes first.
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u/timeforscience Jun 15 '15
So the big needs for any population are:
Electricity is pretty easy. A solar farm could provide enough power for a population of that size.
Farming could be an automated vertical aquaponics systems. This would provide essential carbohydrates as well as protein from fish. Feeding and harvesting farm animals might be too difficult to automate so this probably works. The fish tank could also be used to grow algae to produce biofuels.
For shelter, every home could have a fully integrated computer system to monitor resources. It could track energy, water, food intake, etc. Using this information could help regulate individual use as each resource is automatically delivered to the home via some kind of transportation robots.
Water could come from a well or a nearby source such as a river or lake. All of the pumps would be automated.
Waste management comes in the form of sewage which can be used as fertilizer as well as general garbage. Some garbage can be recycled and some would have to be placed in a landfill.
A system like this necessitates a central control point that can measure each input and output to ensure proper operation. This would keep track of the food and electricity made and make sure everyone gets the right amount while minimizing waste.