That's only because he was doing it as a hobby and because it's one person. A team of workers with larger equipment working 24 hours a day in shifts over the internet could get it done much quicker and cheaper.
In addition to digging basements, there's also grass cutting, delivery bots in restaurants, hospitals, tractor driving.
The length of time it took is probably more a factor of the tiny trucks and backhoes. One can dig out a similar sized hole in weeks using regular equipment.
Real time tele-operations are very expensive and require specialized equipment. Military drone ops cost billions of dollars. Bomb squad robots and law enforcement drones cost half a mil on up. Even the toy dump truck FTA costs $5000. In addition to the equipment cost, there is no way the latency could be compensated for over the regular internet. None of this would make sense for a residential excavation
It's actually really cheap to get a basement dug, in the midwest it's like $1500-$3000 to dig the hole, depending on the size. I've heard as little as $800 for a smaller basement.
Real time teleoperation costs billions?
Everyone (almost), even in third countries,
has skype running, which probably is more bandwith intensive than teleoperation would be. And with teleoperation, there are parts where automation can make it even less bandwith. Plus, one worker can probably control a few machines at the same time while some parts of operation are automated. irobot has this feature (you tell a robot to go somewhere, it goes there, meanwhile you can do something else).
Parent never said "over Skype". And NASA controlled the mars rovers from earth with "nearly five times the speed of home dial-up"; I'm pretty sure you can get more than that from India to the US.
He says over Skype in the post I replied to. Mars rover is not real time, doesn't actually do anything, 5 of them failed, there is a team of highly trained scientists and engineers running the project and the whole thing has cost almost $1B. The current state of the art does not seem to suggest that it is possible for $1 workers in India to dig a basement in Illinois with a tractor controlled over the internet. It certainly is not possible for less than what it costs to just hire local workers to do it.
He said they have Skype running. He didn't say the control would happen over Skype.
Mars rover is not real time, doesn't actually do anything, 5 of them failed, there is a team of highly trained scientists and engineers running the project and the whole thing has cost almost $1B.
I was talking about the bandwidth, not the rest. Yes, Mars rovers were stupidly expensive and difficult. It's freaking Mars. I'm pretty sure we don't need to launch a rocket to get stuff to Illinois, that we don't have a latency of 4h20m and that we can have one guy or two on the location to take care of any issue.
The current state of the art does not seem to suggest that it is possible for $1 workers in India to dig a basement in Illinois with a tractor controlled over the internet. It certainly is not possible for less than what it costs to just hire local workers to do it.
Frankly, without numbers I'm not persuaded either way. Consider the advances in farming vehicles it seems plausible to me.
Holy smokes what a terrible analogy. Most of the cost for the Mars rovers was getting them to Mars. They would have been a whole lot cheaper if 1) We could have delivered them by container ship and 2) We could have had some guy on mars plug them in so we didn't need cells or batteries and 3) that same guy could service them when they break down.
#3 is a big deal. Planetary probes are way, way, way overdesigned compared to what you need on the earth, and all those "ways" cost exponential amounts of money. It probably wouldn't make sense to try to do everything on the job site remotely, but there's really no reason a teleoperated tractor has to cost substantially more than one with a guy in it.
having people in india control it is probably isn't that much cheaper than hiring someone to actually drive it. it mostly likely does not cover your costs of developing systems to remotely control expensive and destructive construction equipment from thousands of miles away.
The exception is when you're operating in difficult environments, where the cost of putting people there is huge (life support costs, hazard pay, losses, etc.).
Space is the obvious example (manned spaceflight might be a good thing politically, or for inspiring people, but no one contests that robots are far more efficient for almost any mission).
A closer to home example is commercial diving. They used to pay people $100-500k/yr to do saturation diving, fairly frequently, at deep sites. Maybe 3-6 weeks of prep, a ship, a transfer chamber, on-deck chamber, a team of support staff, a team of divers, and lots of equipment. Instead, now, they send down a ROV (usually operated from the ship above, but conceivably these could be centrally teleoperated someday too, or autonomous). Commercial divers are still used for smaller tasks, especially where they're not doing saturation diving, but the saturation diving industry in general has been increasingly restricted to shallower jobs or jobs requiring a large amount of work at a single site (involving lots of manual fitting). For the very deepest dives, ROVs and atmospheric diving suits (basically single-person submarines) have basically taken over -- the deep dive record was set in 1992 and no one has tried to match it.
There's also the EOD market (iRobot's packbot), hazmat environments, war zones, etc., where teleoperated equipment will get more and more popular.
It's been a lot of years, and I think the information revealed by my posting on the topic is sufficiently de minimis that no harm is done. I did hesitate for a while over the "reply" button, though.
Workers are actually pretty expensive, more than $20 dollars per hour plus benefits. Then there is the risk of injury which is quite common in construction and mining. The workers in india wouldn't have those problems. To them it would like a video game (no injuries) and their pay would less than $1 per hour, no benefits.
We already have pilots flying drones in afghanistan from nevadda in real time.
The costs of this equipment are not much compared to the labor costs, so outsourcing is viable.
In addition to digging basements, there's also grass cutting, delivery bots in restaurants, hospitals, tractor driving.