Geo1st Century EngineeringTM – Our modern world increasingly presents the need to blend and integrate classic engineering design, construction and operation paradigms with modern measurement instrumentation and spatial modeling technologies — technologies that now capture and represent our world at ever increasing levels of astonishingly realistic detail and precision.
For example, these days, it is a relatively minor accomplishment to observe continental tectonic motion with modern GNSS systems. With a touch more care, these systems can be used to directly observe the diurnal up-and-down Earth-tide motion of “terra firma[sic;-]”.
Laboratory clocks are capable of measuring time differences at the level of picoseconds per million years and portable clocks are chasing this capability – a timing precision quality corresponding to measuring absolute terrestrial elevation differences between points halfway around the world within about a centimeter.
At construction sites, theodolites routinely make angle measurements with precision on the order of a couple seconds of arc, while electronic distance measurements and lidar scanning systems operate at the level of a millimeter or two over site distances of many kilometers, and GNSS can match this spatial quality around the planet.
Most of this may seem entirely academic, and in the past, it has been. However,…
High precision instrumentation is being aggressively incorporated into a multitude of technologies that are themselves now becoming consumers of engineering information products – i.e. autonomous vehicles, robotic and automated construction equipment, augmented and blended reality devices and so on.
Yet, in spite of advances in instrumentation and measurement technology all around us, we continue to perform most engineering activities based on the same idealized concepts from centuries past – concepts that simply are not true at the levels of precision present in our modern instrumentation, nor at the level of precision associated with automated technologies.
To be sure, ignoring reality around us is not a new thing. For example, we’ve known that Earth is “round” for several thousand years, yet we still design engineering projects in “flat” Cartesian coordinate systems devoid of curvature.
Operations and maintenance activities assume that roads and buildings located on Earth will still be in the “same place” when revisited a decade from now – while many locations on the planet move by several, if not many, meters over the lifetime of a physical asset.
Our ignorance of subtleties and detail has been tolerable and even mostly acceptable for human interpretation of engineering data.
Over the years, we’ve developed various techniques, approximations, conventions and workflows that address or at least suppress, most of the basic discrepancies between our abstract idealizations and the hard physical reality in which we find ourselves.
However, the future is no longer only about how “we” interact with engineering data!
Although “we” have been able to use “our” minds to overcome various minor reality gaps, our autonomous and robotic offspring do not, for the most part, have this ability.
Historically, our human engineering roots go back to putting scribbles on papyrus and scratches in clay and stone. The techniques developed in the context of idealized designs have served, and continue serving, “us” very well. However, as important as it is to adhere to precedence, it is also necessary to adapt to change.
The designers of the great pyramid didn’t need to consider autonomously docking robotic supply vehicles or precision maintenance activities being conducted by a robotic caretaker communicating with a constellation of satellites. Yet today, these and many other considerations are very real.
Overall, the time is now for engineering paradigms and conventions to evolve, recognize and fully integrate with the precise reality of our actual physical world. Our engineering designs and documentation are no longer only for human consumption.
Moving into the future, we need to be producing engineering information compatible with consumption by advanced autonomous systems and increasingly self-aware technologies. It is time for…
Geo1st Century EngineeringTM