Adjusting YouTube to half speed was still too fast but quarter speed was too slow. =o(
I’ve been following these videos for some years, finding them curiously relaxing. These models are amazing, and surprisingly powerful with their mini-hydraulics. For a while now I’ve been spreading the idea that a new telerobotics hobby could be built on adapting these models, simulating ‘telebases’ on the Moon and Mars that can be built and operated by a community over the Internet. Following in the footsteps of MIT’s TMRC (the model train club where the concept of hacking is said to have emerged), this could lead to the development of a global amateur telerobotics space program.
Some of the more elaborate of these models really do qualify as telerobots and use of FPV is now common. Recently, Chinese companies have introduced 1:8 scale excavator models that are close to the same size as the robots ESA is planning to build its moonbase with. That could be readily demonstrated with these home-brew telerobots using the mound-formed shell construction technique once use to build bunkers in WWII and later the very space-habitat-like Grin Grin Park arboretum in Japan.
Sadly, I just can’t get people in the space advocacy community to grasp the concept. Seems I will have to demonstrate this idea alone through YouTube videos like these before people get it. I believe we need to be showing robots–to kids especially–in a constructive/cooperative context to counter the overemphasis on fighting, destruction, and Darwinian competition in amateur robotics that seems to be part of the old war-normalization scheme. But I fear I’m alone in this way of thinking…
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I got way more absorbed in that video than I’d planned.
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