Lil4X

That was sorta my take on it - the answer to a question nobody asked. I gassed up two cars and filled three 5-gal cans today between rain showers. It took about ten minutes. There is no way a robotic device could have accomplished that in less than a half-hour. I quit worrying about getting wet.

I once worked on a development team for designing a power "mule line" that could pull up to 400 lbs that could be hooked up to a 90' stand of drill collars arranged vertically in a drilling derrick and tug them upright about 20' to a "stored" position. The job was currently being done by a derrickman working high overhead on the "monkey board" using a length of inch and a quarter rope.

After six months of testing a series of prototypes on land rigs in Texas and Oklahoma we'd come to a finished product that was both safe and powerful. It was easy to use one-handed, and it was about as rugged as it could be. But we couldn't release it to market. What was wrong with it?

Any product that went out of our company would be working in one of the most dangerous areas on earth, the floor (or in this case monkey board) of a drilling rig. Heavy loads, a rapid working pace, and long hours at arduous labor meant that everything we built had to be heavily engineered to make accidents and injuries as remote a possibility as possible. Guards, automatic shutdowns, interlocks and a number of safety features and qualification of every part to handle loads far beyond design specs had to be built into everything we did - or we'd be facing serious lawsuits if a crewman were injured at work.

When all of the development work was done, we'd gone from a 25' piece of rope to a air tugger, 30 feet of braided cable, and a forged hook. By the time the safety team went over the design, we had added a guard rail, sliding sleeve controls, deadman switches, a set of interchangeable hooks, and a selling price of around $30K . . . all to replace a $20 rope. Thanks to a process called "mission creep" we'd taken a simple product and made it extremely complex as new application and safety requirements were added to the criteria list . . . and we'd developed a fine product - that had priced itself out of the market.

I'm afraid that's what happened to the fuel robot. By the time the makers had engineered around all of the potential dangers, solved all of the variable location issues and managed to deliver fuel, they had a machine that was extremely complex, slow to perform its designed task, and well outside the budget of the user. Like our Power Mule, the automated gas pump is going to have to wait for years as entirely new systems are developed or other technologies catch up before they could be made ready for market.

spwolf

imagine it not working properly and scratching your paint... no thanks!

FrankReynoldsCPA

What a lazy bunch of **** we Americans have become.