Author: Yu Hang He, Email: hey6@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 08/12/2019

This week, I had the opportunity to tour most of the Tesla Gigafactory's production line. Unfortunately, I could not take photos of the actual assembly line. The photo above depicts the model of the factory they had set up in the lobby area. Of course, the actual production lines are nothing like the model they showed. For a mechanical engineering student's perspective, there were an impressive amount of automation and robotics that was implemented in the production process. Many parts of the production line was automated with sensors, vacuum grippers, and robotic manipulators. However, there are still many areas that requires manual labor. I also witness the area where Tesla over-automated the production and it was actually less efficient than human labor. Overall, it was a very interesting experience to observe the application of automation in industrial setting.

I have the opportunity to finally meet Matt Jezyk, the senir BIM software engineer and the manager for this robotic construction project. During Monday evening, the BIM team invited me to their team dinner and I had the opportunity to know the team members better. During the travel to the dinner, I had the opportunity to ride on a Tesla Model X with Matt in the driver seat. We discussed various aspects of this project, including potential use case of Spot in the construction and in Tesla's factory.

In all honesty, I have never thought about working with the construction process before. From my minimal experience with construction process, I always had the impression that the technology they employed are archaic. That is the reality of much of the construction process currently. However, it not occur to me that the reason why construction is so out-dated is because of the difficulty of employing robotic and automation during construction due to the chaotic and unstructured nature of construction site. However, with the advance of various sensors and robotics, I believe that there is potential to successfully deploy robots in the work site.

This week, I had the opportunity to study the Boston Dynamic API in preparation for the trip to Boston next week. The API was written in Python and used a RPC client-server model. I brushed up my programming skill with Python and learned how to create custom client and server through BD API. Furthermore, I researched different use cases for Spot in construction area and in Tesla's factory. I believe that I have enough understanding of API to study prototyping and programming once we receive the actual hardware.

Next week, I will travel to Boston Dynamic's headquarter to directly learn how to control Spot from BD's engineers. Hopefully, we well receive answers to all the questions about Spot from their engineering teams. I am looking forward to the opportunity of touring BD's research lab and learn more about what Spot's capability. Fingers crossed that the Spot is as amazing as BD claimed to be.