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Archaeology and Robotics with Daniel Carvalho - Ep 177
265 Plays3 years ago
Daniel Carvalho is a researcher working on applied robotics for archaeology. He's interested in creating an actual robot for archaeological use. We're not talking drones or computer programs alone. We're talking about robots that can do a multitude of tasks for archaeology and beyond.
Connect with James on Twitter: @paleoimaging
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to www.archpodnet.com/archaeotech/177
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- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
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- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
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Transcript
Episode Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello and welcome to the Archaeotech Podcast, episode 177.
Host and Guest Introduction
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm your host, Chris Webster. My co-host, Paul Zimmerman, is gallivanting around Iraq and won't be on this week. Today, I talked to a researcher in archaeology and robotics about how robotics really is the future of archaeology. Let's get to it.
Robotics in Archaeology: An Interview
00:00:26
Speaker
All right. Welcome to the show, everyone. Paul is not joining me today because he is still in Iraq as I'm recording this. I think he'll be back next week as I'm recording this. So he'll probably be on the recording two weeks from now. So our next episode, hopefully, because we do have another couple of interviews coming up and I'm really excited to talk to him about his research methodologies and how things went in his fieldwork project in Iraq. In the meantime, we have an interview
00:00:53
Speaker
with a gentleman doing research in archaeology and robotics and artificial intelligence and all kinds of stuff, as I mentioned in the introduction. So, and I'm going to butcher your name, even though you just told me again, but Daniel Caravaggio, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. And thank you for having on your show. Thank you. Appreciate it.
00:01:12
Speaker
So you are talking to us from Lisbon, Portugal, and you're currently doing a PhD in archaeology and prehistory with the Centro de Archaeologica de Universidad de Lisboa. Yes. We'll call it that.
00:01:27
Speaker
So first, let's talk about your background in archaeology. What has led you to where you're at right now seeking a PhD in archaeology and prehistory? Okay, thank you very much about the opportunity that you gave me. I love your podcast, so I wanted to be part of it too. My journey to archaeology is a little complex because I wanted to go in the first place to robotics.
00:01:53
Speaker
And it all led to the same place, fortunately. And on my PhD, I got the opportunity to make what I wanted to make from the beginning, that it was a robot that could do archaeology. How I got here, it was through theory of archaeology.
00:02:16
Speaker
I began to study how processualism has impacted Portuguese archaeology on my bachelor degree.
00:02:26
Speaker
But then I shifted to another period of time. I wanted to know about cabinets of choreosities and 18th century archaeological thought, if we can say that in that way. And then in my PhD, I
00:02:46
Speaker
I thought to myself, okay, now it's the time to do what I really want to do. So I got to robotics and archaeology and fused it with theory to produce a robot that could make the archaeological theory.
Can Robots Perform Archaeological Tasks?
00:03:04
Speaker
So that's really interesting. And I'm wondering how you even proposed that kind of a PhD to an academic
00:03:11
Speaker
program. So let me flip the question around again. So I asked you how you came to archaeology. Well, how did you how did you come to robotics and all that? Because there's very few archaeology departments out there, they're going to have a robotics department at the same time. So you must be working with either some other roboticists or some other robotics departments. But what about your own expertise? Are you looking to build this kind of thing? Or are you working with other people to
00:03:36
Speaker
construct something and work with these fields in order to use them in archaeology? I always work by myself. It was my hobby since I remember I'm doing robots, little robots, things that can move, things that can move other things. My interest now is to
00:04:02
Speaker
elevates them to another plane, the plane of theory and artificial intelligence. So I'm not currently working with roboticists.
00:04:15
Speaker
I'm fortunately working with archaeologists with backgrounds that are similar to robotics, computer science, statistics. But I'm building it on my own. The failures will be only mine. And I think it's interesting to
00:04:41
Speaker
to an archaeologist to do the robot, even if I'm not a roboticist and I'm for sure aren't. It's interesting for me to fail and to invent something. I've always done it in this way. I have done a lot of failures and prototypes, but I think that is the way to create something new
00:05:10
Speaker
So I'm comfortable with that. Did you seek out this program, the program that you're at? I noticed there's a program in Lisbon and a program in Barcelona as well that you're affiliated with. Did you seek these out because of their connections with
00:05:26
Speaker
technology so it would help you do this or did you happen or is this just nearby and convenient and you're able to do what you want to do? I think both. Both centers of archaeology give me different ways to produce this kind of work and at Lisbon I have people that help me a lot with archaeological theory
00:05:54
Speaker
even if they are not many because in Portugal we still lack a lot of research on archaeological theory in my opinion and in Barcelona we have a very good school of
00:06:11
Speaker
computer applications to archaeology. So I was fortunate enough to have been accepted in a program where I could study the two ways that I thought were the best to achieve my goal.
Current PhD Work and Robot Development
00:06:30
Speaker
Okay, that's awesome. I like that. So let's talk a little bit about what you're doing right now then.
00:06:38
Speaker
I'm trying to phrase this question in a way that gets to what the heart of what you're doing is right now. So you're working on a PhD.
00:06:47
Speaker
You're not probably, I mean, probably a byproduct is, yes, we're looking at robots. We'll talk about exactly what form these robots take and what they will do. But yes, you're trying to produce a body of work that produces a robot that, quote, does archaeology. But for your actual PhD, like what what kind of question are you trying to answer? Is it can robots be developed that can do archaeology or is it something is it something different? I'm just trying to figure out what your your actual PhD topic is. OK, that is an interesting question.
00:07:17
Speaker
So Beth asked me that my main goal and the main question of the PhD is, can robots do archaeology? But I'm sincerely thinking that I can, that the answer is yes. So I'm moving from that to how can robots do archaeology?
00:07:42
Speaker
Fusing them, the answer was to build an actual robot. By other words, only theory could not build this PhD. I had to demonstrate with an actual and physical robot that it could be possible
00:08:01
Speaker
to do archaeology. This is very problematic because the first task is to determine what is archaeology and even human archaeologists are entirely sure of what it is. But even with the definition, we have to think very deeply on how we work.
00:08:29
Speaker
and in what we were and why we were kids. And theory of archaeology enters here. So I'm moving at the moment a kind of brain that could do basic tasks that we do. This is not entirely new in some fields. We have, for example, automatic typologies,
00:08:57
Speaker
We have postured fragments in the identification, but I wanted to go a step further and I think this is why I'm
Autonomous Analysis by Robots
00:09:09
Speaker
able to do the program that I am currently on. Is that?
00:09:15
Speaker
not only to identify, not only to search, but to analyze by itself, and then produce an argument. That is my goal. That is the goal of the brain that I'm building, to produce some kind of theory, maybe not high tier,
00:09:42
Speaker
theory, I'm thinking about maybe argument construction, not theories, not very long theories or very complex theories, but maybe the logical arguments. And even so, only that would would be fantastic to our opinion. It would help us a lot.
00:10:12
Speaker
Okay, I've got a number of questions for you. But I think this is going to be I'm going to do some shorter segments for this podcast, just so our listeners are aware. And I mean, the reason is I'm trying to be respectful of your time is very late in the evening for you. But I think this is fantastic. And to be honest, I'd rather have a slightly shorter
00:10:32
Speaker
episode get to the meat of what we're trying to do here and then you know as you I mean I would love to follow this to be honest and as you go through your PhD research have you know come back on and say hey we found this out or you know you decided to do this and it would just be really interesting to follow this journey so let's take a break and then on the other side I've got some other questions about robots back in a minute
00:10:56
Speaker
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00:11:15
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00:11:25
Speaker
For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P A L E O imaging.com and check out the link in the show notes. Welcome back to episode one 77 of the architect podcast. And as I mentioned, it's just me today.
00:11:41
Speaker
Paul is out strolling around in Iraq looking for fun and interesting archaeology. So again, we'll talk to him when he gets back about that. But we're here with Daniel talking about robotics and archaeology. And you mentioned in the last segment, Daniel, I mean, you had a hard time, which I totally understand, like just defining what archaeology means. So you can say, I want a robot to do archaeology. And we talk about that on the Archaeology Podcast Network and the CRM podcast.
00:12:06
Speaker
all the time. What does archaeology actually mean? Is it research? Is it digging? Is it walking around on the ground and looking at stuff? Is it writing reports? That's a hard definition, but I was also wondering why you were saying that.
00:12:21
Speaker
How do you find, how do you define robot? Right? Like because a robot could conceivably just be an intelligent computer program that does things for you. What about drones? Are drones running on an automatic program that you set up for them? Or maybe even one that says, Hey, I want this area surveyed. You figure out how to do it. Is that also a robot like in your
00:12:42
Speaker
Well, first, I want to hear you define robot for the purposes of your thesis, but then maybe also define robot for what you're trying to achieve because some people might be imagining, you know, a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica or something like that, you know, arms and legs and, you know, just using a shovel to dig a hole.
Defining 'Robot' in Archaeology
00:12:59
Speaker
So, how did you define robot for this study and how were you defining robot for exactly what you're looking for? Okay, this is another complex question because roboticists probably have this problem too. Yeah, probably. The meaning of robot is not a pleasant one. It came from Ruhr
00:13:23
Speaker
a marvelous piece of literary work and it means labor force, forced work so it's difficult to say what is a robot today because many robots today lack a physical form and that was like
00:13:44
Speaker
a major definition in classical robotics that robotics is something that we can induce a kind of function.
00:14:00
Speaker
But that something was material. But now we are on an entirely new dimension. We have robots that do not exist in our present life as objects. We have artificial intelligence. We have drones that are a kind of hybrid because drones, and I'm glad you asked that, drones are
00:14:27
Speaker
the main robot that we view today, and they are hybrid, they have a physical body, but they have a brain, a set of algorithms that we can program to do certain functions, they fly, they take photos, but they can identify objects too, so they have computer vision. So I think the most useful definition that we can have
00:14:55
Speaker
of a robot concerning humanities and archaeology is a machine that can function with a set of instructions. That set of instructions being made by a human.
00:15:16
Speaker
or mediated by a human because robots today can interact with other robots and program another robot. And we see that all the time on the internet, the bots pop ups, the unfortunately, unfortunately, the spam. So it's it's a difficult world. But I think the most useful definition is it's data what I gave you.
00:15:46
Speaker
So, so on to the second half of that question, then how in the context of archaeology and your dissertation, what, I guess, what kind of robot are you thinking you want to, I don't know, I don't know if develop is the right word, but at least theorize for archaeology in the context of the work
Task-Specific vs. Multifunctional Robots
00:16:05
Speaker
you're doing now. So in the first year, I thought that a simple robot, and by that, I mean, like a mannequin.
00:16:16
Speaker
I'm building a robot named Talos of the Greek legend. He's not going to destroy anything, I hope, but he is intending to be a humanoid robot, a robot about human height with human similarities, and it exists
00:16:47
Speaker
was my first, and it is still my first objective, but then I had a problem because how could it analyze text? Being only a physical form. Sure, I could put some components that enable him to do that, but the solution that I encountered was why make a robot?
00:17:15
Speaker
to do all the functions. When you can make smaller robots that do a function, each one of them. So I'm building Talos, but I'm building
00:17:28
Speaker
extensions of tallows as well. So I'm building drones, I'm building little cameras that I'm calling them the eyes because they see like us.
00:17:46
Speaker
And they are connected to a microcontroller that is like a tiny brain that has a set of algorithms that say, hey, this is a prehistoric artifact. And I say to them, good. And this, this is a Roman artifact. Yeah. Okay. So I'm building smaller robots and fusing them together with the main body.
00:18:14
Speaker
And that surprised me at first. But then I thought, okay, this is not very, this is not very different from us. We are archaeologists, but we have a lot of tasks to do digging, analyzing, producing reports, theorizing. So why not build something that could do everything
00:18:44
Speaker
but at smaller scale. And that's how I'm doing my PhD, building a little brick of the wall at the time. Well, that sounds really cool and pretty interesting. I mean, when you were saying, well, first off, I feel like every roboticist in a fictional or science fiction circumstance that says, you know, I hope it doesn't destroy the world. Sure.
00:19:11
Speaker
The next thing you know, we have we have Skynet and Terminator. So so anyway, this is this is interesting because I mean, there's so many different, I guess,
00:19:24
Speaker
I guess tasks and when you were talking about, you know, processors and, and, and having a more human full-sized human sized robot as your first thought of doing this, obviously some of the problems that you run into are some of the things that you mentioned, right? Like the computing power required for something like that to become a human while we're getting closer and closer to having something like that on board, the power requirements and all that stuff is just, is just so high, right? In order to, you know, get something to like that to function, say out in the field or something.
00:19:53
Speaker
in a good way. But I'm just kind of wondering from a theoretical standpoint, man, with cellular technology being almost everywhere and even satellite technology getting a lot better, we just got Starlink satellite for our RV. My wife and I live in a recreational vehicle and travel around the country and we got Starlink satellite and the disk for that is actually pretty small, a lot smaller than I expected it to be. And I imagine that technology is just going to be getting smaller and smaller and
00:20:20
Speaker
With those kinds of speeds, are you thinking about the robot's computing power and its functional and analytical power all being on board, or are you offloading some of that to the internet, basically doing some offline processing or using banks of servers somewhere else but the internet or cellular networks to communicate with those servers?
00:20:42
Speaker
I'm just wondering if it all has to be on board or is there a local server that these things would communicate with or something remote that they would communicate with? Okay, both. I think that the main robot, it exists for that function, but another very important function that is human interaction.
00:21:05
Speaker
and human communication. That's why he is a humanoid bat with the power that we have today. And the complex task here is not to build something that is capable of analyzing, because that is almost trivial today. The problem here is to make something that is a true tool
00:21:35
Speaker
and that brings more benefit.
00:21:38
Speaker
to archaeologists. But in all fields of archaeology, it's very difficult to build a robot that functions on a lab and on the fieldwork at the same time. Because that involves motion, it involves a protection from weather, it involves something as simple as solar energy and have
00:22:08
Speaker
simply a plug on the middle of the field. The problem here is to make something that is so vast and I breathe as the past itself. And that is an humongous task. And I think it's very difficult to grasp even that. So I'm building what we are
00:22:31
Speaker
or what I think that we are more capable now, but one thing that we may work towards is virtual reality allied to all this. I think it will have a major impact on archaeology and I really really want to explore that dimension too with my robot. I think we can make awesome simulations of the past and
00:23:02
Speaker
even simulating fieldwork and probabilities and hypotheses. It's amazing. The world we live now is full of opportunities in terms of technology and archaeology.
Virtual Reality in Archaeology
00:23:20
Speaker
We need to use it to our benefit. We can't just close our eyes and think that the past is
00:23:31
Speaker
inaccessible. We have a lot of tools today. Right. Well, you're speaking to the right audience regarding that for sure. At least me anyway. And I know Paul would love to be in this discussion too. That's why we need to have you back on because I have a feeling he would have a lot of questions for you regarding some of the more technical aspects of this. But I've got a few more things to say about this for sure and some high level questions to ask you moving forward. And we'll do that on the other side of the break in segment three. Back in a minute.
00:24:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the archaeo tech podcast, our final segment. And we are talking about robotics and archaeology. And Daniel, a couple of things that you said last segment really had me thinking here, but I got to backtrack and make sure make sure that we cover everything. So we've talked about a number of things, you know, regarding the, you know, I guess shape and size and capabilities of certain robots, but
00:24:25
Speaker
What specific tasks do you see early robots in this field actually doing, right? You know, I'm thinking we have everything from, like you mentioned lab work. So there's analytical things that can be done in lab work. There's just straight up digging and surveying and all kinds of things we do in the field. Like what specific tasks do you see?
00:24:46
Speaker
the first ones that a robot could possibly take over. Okay, the first ones, and I think that it's being made today, it's artifact identification on the lab. That's the main thing that it's being produced today. What I wanted to see more is structures
00:25:10
Speaker
On the field, I would like to see more drones utilizing computer vision. So when I have a drone surveying a site, I would like it to make assumptions of how the terrain behaves, of what kind of chronological periods may be there.
00:25:36
Speaker
And what kind of structures he can be seeing from a different view of ours. I think I want, I really wanted to see more of that because that is not that hard. Everyone or almost everyone has a drone today. And they are really, really
00:26:01
Speaker
And they are going to be even cheaper as time goes on. And to build the components that bring life to a drone in terms of computer vision is not that hard. It's going to be much cheaper than LiDAR, for example.
00:26:25
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And it doesn't produce the same results, but we can make a lot of data with that. It would be. Yes, yes.
00:26:39
Speaker
that just on drones real quick, it would be really cool because I mean, I've programmed drones and I think Paul's doing that right now in Iraq, but I've programmed drones to say, you know, look at a look at a certain, you know, area and then run this path across this area. And then it just comes back. But all it's doing is taking pictures. It will be super cool if it could identify something while it's doing that and market as a target that it wants to go back to or stop in in the process.
00:27:06
Speaker
and say, you know what, I think I'm gonna slow down and take some better pictures of this thing and analyze it a little better and maybe even process the photogrammetric structure that it could build on board and then make some assumptions, like you said, about, hey, I think we might have something here. And I took a little extra data about it, so let's see what we think. But that seems like we're so close to that, doesn't it? We are already there. Yeah. We just need to teach it.
00:27:36
Speaker
That's the main thing. We have all that we need in our hands. The time that we need to learn these things is not a lot. Almost any archaeologist today knows about photogrammetry, even if
00:28:01
Speaker
somebody can't transform some data into photogrammetry, we can understand it. And with drones is even simpler. It's just thinking about this question. How can I tell to someone, someone being a drone, in this case, to identify a certain
00:28:30
Speaker
Think this is a task that archaeologists do all the time and we need to communicate that not only to humans but to robots and tools like drones so they can help us build more complex theories about the past.
00:28:52
Speaker
I think that is the most useful thing that we can do regards technology in archaeology. It's to teach it to help us make better assumptions about the past and archaeology. Okay, I've got a question about that that I'll save towards the end.
00:29:13
Speaker
I want to step back one more time to something else you said in segment two, because I couldn't let this go. You mentioned talking about virtual reality and how we need to incorporate more virtual reality. And you did say some things that I have thought about before as well, and I know others as well too, using virtual reality to not only train and being able to see and interact with data.
00:29:36
Speaker
and and sites and and you know things in a different way that's non-destructive because it is virtual reality and if we can replicate it there then we can do things that we wouldn't be able to do in real life but what about like a virtual reality i mean maybe i've seen the matrix too many times but like a virtual reality control of the field robots you know what i mean like you're you're you're seeing
00:29:58
Speaker
You're kind of seeing through their eyes, but their eyes are building the world around you and you're wearing a headset and you're sitting in the comforts of your safe, comfortable office where you don't have the dangers sometimes of weather and being in the field and other things that can happen. I've worked, I've mentioned it on this podcast before, I worked on a
00:30:16
Speaker
Navy base in California where there were unexploded ordnance and bombs and missiles all over the place and rattlesnakes and all kinds of things. And, you know, I mean, we want to do the archaeology, but we want to be safe while we're doing it. So this is a really good way to do that. But is there talk in this field about using virtual or augmented reality to actually control? And I don't know if they'd even be robots at that point, because if you're driving them, then they're just vehicles. Right. But it's some sort of combination.
00:30:45
Speaker
Absolutely. We don't need virtual reality to do that. We can do it without it. But I think it's it's best to build an entire environment to because to archaeologists context, it's
00:31:06
Speaker
Basilar to what to everything with that we do so I think to have something that can build
00:31:16
Speaker
an environment at the same time that is excavating, digging, recording, it's going to be phenomenal. If it is still a robot, I think yes, because we need to think about this as, again, an hybrid, because it's not an autonomous vehicle. It can be in some tasks, but
00:31:46
Speaker
We don't want to erase the human factor here. On the contrary, we want to emphasize it. So to have, for example, in subaquatic archaeology, an autonomous vehicle that can dive to a certain depth and then we enter
00:32:10
Speaker
on what the robot is doing, and we can manipulate it and receive data from him. We are at that moment now. We have the technology to do it. Like a famous film.
00:32:29
Speaker
Since we have the technology to to make all of these things happen I think we just need a little more capacity on our side to understand that Technology is not a menace to archaeology in terms of it destroying jobs for example or reducing archaeologists to
00:32:56
Speaker
mere observers of robots I think the other way around I think technology can elevate us truly and I think if we can automate some of the tasks that we do we can bring so much more to the table in scientific terms and discoveries and theories by working with robots and technology in general so yeah virtual reality
00:33:26
Speaker
can be used that way, can be used in countless other ways. We can dig the same site hundreds of times. And that for me is really, really interesting how we can make different theories about the same site, about the same data that is never destroyed.
00:33:52
Speaker
that kind of experience needs to be made more often, I think. Yeah, I think something that made me think of was when we're often doing an excavation, the only photographs we will often take in normal practice is maybe the first photograph of a level before we start digging it in, say, a one meter by one meter square or something. And then we'll take a photograph of the last when we get down 10 centimeters or whatever that is.
00:34:20
Speaker
And we might take a photograph of a profile or a picture if we find that, but if we were able to have, you know, something recording everything as we go down, and if a robot were doing this excavation, it would be able to, you know, record as it's doing this sort of thing, everything that's happening. Then we could bring that into something like virtual reality and we could
00:34:41
Speaker
kind of replay the excavation from either a training standpoint you know having students replay the excavation so we know exactly where everything is and they can just excavate virtually and or even from a standpoint of
00:34:54
Speaker
Maybe we missed something the first time around, you know what I mean? That might be found later on. Maybe we should have actually made it something in one way, but we did it in another way and we just missed something. So I think that's really cool. And you alluded to something that I was going to bring up as one of my last questions, but I kind of want to talk about a little more.
00:35:14
Speaker
What do you actually say to people, especially archaeologists, that say robots are going to take our jobs? Because I personally understand that they would be an augmentation to what we're doing. They would free us up to do the more analytical, the more scientific tasks, and kind of take a little bit of the mundane work away from it, which is admittedly some people just like that kind of work. But as scientists, I feel like it would allow us to be better scientists. But what kind of arguments do you make for people that say,
00:35:42
Speaker
you know, hey, you're just taking our jobs and giving them to robots. The first argument is simple and it's a very crude one. Financially, it's not viable to substitute archaeologists for robots. And the cost of a robot, it's
00:36:05
Speaker
too high for a human. In other areas we are seeing that humans are being replaced, but that is specific to the conditions and to the functions that are
00:36:24
Speaker
being augmented and being made better and for example in where are warehouses we don't need humans anymore because we have little robots that go to precise places that don't sleep.
00:36:43
Speaker
that do not need to rebel for better work conditions and some jobs are disappearing and some jobs have already disappeared, but that depends greatly on what the jobs do and what the jobs produce. We archaeologists produce a kind of knowledge that financially is not very appellateive to
00:37:14
Speaker
big corporations, big data, big governmental issues. In terms of finance, I say it again, not in terms of heritage, because what we do is of paramount importance in my view, in heritage, in memory, in engaging with communities about their identity, their past, but
00:37:42
Speaker
Financially, it's not that great of a deal. The second argument that I always make is that this is not a debate of replacement. This is a debate to make better tools. The microscope did not replace any scientist.
00:38:04
Speaker
It only opened the door to more science. And we don't need to fear scientific developments on technology that goes even further.
00:38:22
Speaker
Helping science, I think it's a paradox. Why should we fear that kind of technology if we can do better science and understand better the world we live in? I don't think it makes sense.
Will Robots Replace Archaeologists?
00:38:38
Speaker
But I do understand the fear. I don't want to replace archaeologists. Yeah.
00:38:44
Speaker
I truly want them to be a better version of what we are now. I think the way can only be that. I want the robots that I make to be tools and to help everyone that needs it.
00:39:02
Speaker
And you asked me on the other segment, I want these robots or these databases to be accessible for everyone. Maybe the physical robots want to be because they are prototypes, but the databases must be free to everyone.
00:39:26
Speaker
Because it doesn't make sense to build something, in my view, that helps discovery. If common archaeologists can't use it, we can't simply make it so a tool that only certain people can utilize. We need to make it open for everyone.
00:39:52
Speaker
so that everyone can share their opinion and engage with the
00:40:00
Speaker
research of everyone else. I think of it as a connected world, a truly connected world, and robots can help us build it. Well said. I've been thinking about some of this stuff for a while now, and that is right in line. And I think you've got it spot on how the microscope didn't replace the scientists, it just made better scientists. I think with archaeological data, there's constant conversations about how
00:40:31
Speaker
We have so much data that's already been collected, right? So while we have to go out and do field projects, I'm a CRM archaeologist in the United States, of course. And while we have to go out and do field projects because there's development and there's things that are prompting these digs, it's just adding to this data set that we already haven't fully inadequately analyzed. So if we can
00:40:53
Speaker
If we can either use robots to either A, do the fieldwork and collect the data while we're doing more analysis and really doing the theorizing and the writing of reports and things like that, or at the same time, having more analysis that's able to be done on these archive collections that we have that really haven't been thoroughly studied, either way, the assistance would be useful. Having assistance in that area from a tireless
00:41:22
Speaker
you know, workforce that is hyper intelligent and can do things and can do it without, you know, questioning or complaint would be phenomenal to aid in the science and to just better what we can do and increase what we can do. So 100% on board with this.
Closing Remarks and Future Invitations
00:41:39
Speaker
Well, Daniel, thanks for coming on. And I hope that we can certainly talk to you as your research develops and, you know, new things come out and you want to come back on the show and talk about them. Hey, if there's something you read, you go to a conference about new developments in robotics and AI and stuff that you can think can help archaeology, send us an email and come on the show and let's talk about it. We love just having the conversation about these kind of things. And I think our audience is like it as well. Thank you very much.
00:42:09
Speaker
All right. Well with that, thank you, Daniel. And we will be back next time, hopefully with Paul this time, if he's recovered from his five weeks in, uh, in Iraq, we'll see. All right. Thanks a lot. And we'll see you in two weeks.
00:42:26
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paul at lugall.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
00:42:52
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.