

‘Beep,’ Says the Bellhop - mrbird
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/technology/hotel-to-begin-testing-botlr-a-robotic-bellhop.html

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VLM
TLDR summary: Its a wheeled robot doing the job of a dumbwaiter.

(A dumbwaiter is a tiny smaller than person sized elevator in a room which
reaches down into a kitchen/office area. Bigger than the pneumatic tubes that
move cash at legacy brick and mortar physical stores and bank branches. I
don't think they're terribly popular anymore and are best seen in black and
white movies. I have the carpentry skills to build one into my house for the
sheet WTFness of the artifact, but not the motivation to research any fire
related building codes or just simple motivation at all.)

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ddt
My understanding is that dumbwaiters and laundry chutes fall under a fire code
which boils down to "Nah, dude. Don't do that" just about everywhere. Vertical
passages are great for fires, and bad for people who like not being on fire.

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VLM
Its not a serious challenge.

There's a whole industry built around selling trash chutes and "soiled linen"
hardware for hotels and skyscrapers in even the most authoritarian nanny
states. So everything sold is NYC skyscraper firecode rated and NFPA certified
or whatever even if its going in a 2-floor residential in a civilized area
where its not even regulated. You can get a kit of the self closing doors for
the top and a fusible link gadget that closes a door at the bottom for about
the cost of a Really good video card, at least for a small linen chute. Its
cheaper but probably less safe to have the fusible link thing, although you
can put an automatic closing fireproof door in the basement end too. This is
all standard COTS stuff nothing weird or custom.

Trying to do the safety stuff by myself would likely be super aggravating and
end up being more expensive than just buying the doors and tube COTS. I'll
have enough carpentry agony installing and trimming it out to make it look
good, anyway.

Its apparently a lot of work to fireblock the tube where it goes thru the
floor and ceilings and also trimming it out so it looks nice is non-trivial.
If the hole were big enough for an elevator you'd just jump in, but if its
barely big enough for a shoebox, how you do that work with out ripping away
all the drywall is non-trivial. And that leads to lots of work.

The hack for a dumbwaiter is building all of it inside the tube. Any hole in
the tube or a hole in the doors, even just to mount stuff, and I guess its not
technically fireproof anymore. Adhesives would probably be OK? So there's some
serious hacking potential involved here. You end up doing the "ship in a
bottle" thing with a truss inside the tube at the top and bottom and the usual
array of pulleys and ropes.

Another problem with dumb waiters is the price of the fireproof doors and tube
is really cheap for "laundry chute size" but if you want to carry an entire
laundry basket inside a dumb waiter inside the chute, it starts getting
expensive, and a fireproof door the size of a dorm fridge approached 4 figures
when I last looked into this.

Still, it would be pretty awesome, in my infinite spare time...

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lutusp
Quote: " ... And will the next stage of machine automation lead to more job
elimination?"

That part we can be sure of. It seems there's always some hype and speculation
in an article like this, but elimination of low-level jobs seems certain. Why?
It's the basic economic rationale for developing this kind of technology.

This is a trend that (some claim) started with the invention of the Jacquard
loom in the early 19th century, which eliminated many low-level textile jobs
and resulted in what's now called the Luddite rebellion -- acts of protest and
equipment destruction by people whose jobs were eliminated by automated
mechanical methods.

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nnnnni
...so basically we're at the "robot butler" stage of Cylon development? That
thing seems a lot like the common household robot in the (new) Battlestar
Galactica pre-series "Blood & Chrome".

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TeMPOraL
Did you mean "Caprica"?

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nnnnni
Oh, was it Caprica? Oops.

