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points by Karliss 4 days ago | 0 comments

Only widespread commercial application of cable robots I have seen is cameras in stadiums and concert venues.

I guess in most industrial use cases it makes more sense to have a robot stationary and move the parts around with conveyors. Doing it that way allows to pipeline and parallelize the manufacturing process. In contrast the large operating volume covered by cable robot needs to be served by single robot exclusively.

[–] daemonologist 4 days ago

I've always thought they could be good in agriculture (can't pipeline the ground, after all). Dealing with wind would probably require a ~fully constrained 6 line system though.

[–] defrost 4 days ago

"Agriculture" contains multitudes; here's an indoor pollination warehouse operation with pipeline tracks on the ground and no wind issues:

* https://costagroup.com.au/2022/07/06/world-first-robotic-pol...

  Australia's $900-million-a-year greenhouse tomato industry currently relies on farmers pollinating by hand
    “So we've managed to design a robot that pollinates greenhouse tomatoes.”
    “It autonomously drives along the rows, finds flowers that are ready for pollination using artificial intelligence, and sends air pulses to vibrate the flowers in a very specific manner to imitate buzz pollination as performed by bumblebees.”

* https://www.arugga.com/news/pollinating-robot-looking-to-sha...

[–] fritzo 4 days ago

Cables are indeed used extensively in tree agriculture

https://www.fs.usda.gov/forestmanagement/equipment-catalog/c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_logging

[–] conductr 4 days ago

The MakerMade CNC machine is pretty interesting concept