I doubt a rasping/digging robot can keep going for years on an asteroid. Especially since you never know what kind of hard substance you're going to hit. Find a small pocket of diamond hardness and your robot is broken.Robots can be designed to deal with things like this. Mark II.
How would your ablation approach collect material for resource extraction?
Here on earth, construction and mining will become automated. Robots will soon begin mining...
antialias_physorg
Jan 29, 2013I doubt a rasping/digging robot can keep going for years on an asteroid. Especially since you never know what kind of hard substance you're going to hit. Find a small pocket of diamond hardness and your robot is broken.