Autonomous Actors – Autonomous Infrastructure Installation & Management

I’ve known for a long time that burying pipes and wires or stringing them up on poles is not only an obsolete approach to infrastructure but is hurting our economy and our lives.

Installing new buried or aerial infrastructure is expensive and disruptive. This infrastructure is trouble-prone and hard to maintain. Because it’s so expensive to make changes, we aren’t getting the new services and reduced costs from new technologies.

Only recently did I realize that autonomous technology can be a large part of the solution to the infrastructure problem.

A-Ways can provide protected space for all types of infrastructure. Autonomous Vehicles and Actors can make installation, maintenance and replacement easy and inexpensive. I’ll expand on this, but first, here are some examples of the problems with the current approach to infrastructure.

Often communications, power, and entertainment share the same poles in aerial installations – even though companies know buried infrastructure is more secure than aerial, it’s a bit more expensive, so you see the forests of poles and webs of wires.

We woke up one morning to sirens and bright lights outside our condo window. A car had knocked over a utility pole, so the power, telephone, and cable people spent the whole day replacing the pole and reconnecting all the wires, blocking the nearby bridge the entire time – what an expensive mess.

At our home in the Adirondacks many of us have generators because of the frequency of power failures during the winter as ice snaps trees, breaking wires. Last month, even though it was summer, we had a power failure during a thunderstorm. I picked up the phone to call the power company but the phone was out, so I picked up my mobile phone to call the power company but the cell service was out too. Finally we drove to our friend’s house: their generator was running and their phone worked so we called the power company, we also borrowed 5 gallons of water because our water pump runs on electricity.

Burying infrastructure is left over from a time when technology changed slowly, if at all.

You Won't Believe How Reliant New York Is On One 84-Year-Old Pipe. There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks each year in the United States.

The old Bell System was proud that it had copper cables 40 years old. Almost 25 years ago, when I was in charge of developing a wireless strategy, the average wired loop cost on the order of $1,000 per line while a low power digital radio technology was less than $100 per line – so what good is that 40 year old copper? Yes, I know new electronics are enabling more bandwidth on that copper pair, but it’s doing the same thing for the low power digital radio – see how much fun planning for technology can be. J

Super Storm Sandy flooding forced our condo to repair all the wiring for outdoor lighting because the salt water corroded underground junctions that had withstood 30 years of rain water, and the power company had similar problems all around the area.

Water pipes, sewage pipes, gas pipes, communications cables, entertainment cables, power wires, and others are buried separately. Thus we dig up the streets and our yards over and over, leaving the streets, yards and sidewalks a mess.

You have likely seen preparations for a new buried installation: yellow and purple and orange spray paint on the streets, sidewalks, and grass marking each of the different existing pipes and wires, so the new installation doesn’t dig up the others and disrupt their service, or worse cause a fire or explosion.

While replacing some plants, we had the gas company mark where their pipes ran so we wouldn’t run into them. I was happily digging up a plant 6’ away from the purple gas line marking in the grass and my shovel hit what I thought must be a stone. Fortunately, I looked more closely because, you guessed it, there was the gas pipe – imagine what would have happened if I had really stomped on that shovel!

Remember a few years ago when Newark airport was closed for a whole day because the 3 supposedly marked and separate power cables were laid next to each other in a conduit: NEWARK AIRPORT IS CLOSED AS CREW CUTS POWER LINES.

So what can we do differently, how much will it cost, and are there other benefits? 

As soon as I started thinking about enclosing A-Ways, I realized that this is a perfect place to install infrastructure: communications, power, water, sewers, gas, and other services.

While building the A-Way, the incremental cost to add space for infrastructure is very low: when you are building a house, including a basement is almost free because they have to put in the foundation anyway.

The A-Way would protect infrastructure from weather, floods, errant cars, animals, sabotage, terrorists, and all sorts of other hazards. (Did you know that squirrels and other rodents like to chew on cables? It’s a significant problem.) And the infrastructure is all out of sight.

Super Storm Sandy reminded me that the protection from the elements and the ready access to all the infrastructure would eliminate failures from disasters and greatly reduce the time to repair or replace infrastructure when there was a failure – I’ll talk more about this in future posts when I talk in more detail about Infrastructure design for Sustainable Communities.

The A-Way can also be constructed to protect the infrastructure components from each other: water and electricity don’t mix; drinking water and sewage don’t mix, power cables can induce voltages in communications cables, etc.

Because you don’t need to dig new trenches or install poles, the cost of installation is greatly reduced.

Saving even more money, Autonomous Vehicles can bring in the cable, pipes, equipment and the workers to perform the installation. And you can work in any weather, because it is enclosed, you aren’t disrupting traffic, digging up streets and generally making a mess.

And because installation is so much cheaper for each of the installations this even helps defray the cost of enclosing the A-Ways – that’s just one of the advantages of including all aspects of a system in finding solutions.

Operations and maintenance is easier, faster, and cheaper because Autonomous Vehicles provide secure access to any point along the infrastructure.

Not only is it easy to install infrastructure components, it’s easy to add additional capacity, install new technology, and even remove the old components – used copper has a high recycling value, so removing those 40-year old communications and power cables could yield a nice dividend.

New technologies have transformed several infrastructure approaches already: copper telephone loops are rapidly being replaced by wireless; TV used to be delivered over-the-air, but coax cable replaced the airwaves, and now wireless Internet is starting to replace the coax.

I predict that new technologies will come increasingly fast: I’ve already mentioned the potential for  Pipe-Free Water and Waste Processing, Integrated Heating & Refrigeration System , and an Integrated Lighting System.

The A-Ways need to provide innovative communications to support Cloudlet Computing, Communications & Control. For example, unobstructed space within the A-Way, protected from weather would enable innovative through-the-air optics to save the cost and restrictions of fiber optic cables.

I’ll bet you thought I had forgotten that this section is supposed to be about Autonomous Actors. J

With the A-Way providing easy access for Autonomous Vehicles all along each of the infrastructure components, we’ve set the stage for innovations in Autonomous Actors.

Installation of buried cables is already partially automated with combination digger/cable layers, and factories are full of robots performing assembly functions with better quality, lower cost, and higher capacity than manual factories.

So we can anticipate that Autonomous Actors to install, operate, maintain, and even remove and salvage all sorts of infrastructure components aren’t far off once we have A-Ways for them to operate in.

These Autonomous Actors will greatly speed up the process of installations, because not only don’t we have to dig up the streets, because the space is already there and accessible, but Autonomous Actors can work 24 hours a day with consistently high quality.

The Autonomous Actors can weld pipes, fix leaks, remove and replace pipe sections, adjust or replace electronics, repair cable breaks, and all manner of operations, maintenance and repair on all the infrastructure components. When I talk about Sustainable Community design, I will address design options such as redundancy and reliability to further ease repairs and replacements.

As new technologies come along, the Autonomous Actors can quickly install them, and remove the old technologies to be used elsewhere or recycled.

We will benefit not only from lower costs, but no disruptions, clear landscapes, and new services.