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Contour Crafting - Extrude-a-House
lww writes "An article in New Scientist discusses the work of Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California to design and build a fully automated robot that performs Contour Crafting, his name for a process to extrude successive layers of semi-fluid building mixtures like concrete to create entire structures. In the article, he says 'The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands.' by 2005. I'm pretty jazzed at the potential to construct buildings with highly curved/creative contours that would be impossible using current construction techniques."
Boy, and I thought houses in housing developments were too cookie-cutter now.
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Now, all I have to do is get Fred out of the way...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am moving to Mars where they still build houses the old fashion way. Wait... what? ..... Aww crap
At first I read that as "Extrude-a-Horse." I was picturing some unfortunate horse being turned to goo as it was extruded through a small pinhole. Ick.
ex'trude v. ex'trud'ed, ex'trud'ing, ex'trudes
v. tr. 1. To push or thrust out.
Boy, the trolls are going to have a field day with this one.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Would anyone ever be proud to say "a robot shat my home"? These things will likely replace trailer-houses: the Cletus Delroy's of the future can say "Hey Maw! We're movin' to a brand spankin' new droid-turd!"
Try getting something like this pushed past the trade unions. You might wake up with a horse head under your sheets.
Or during the night one of the house-crapping bots extrudes an entire 64-unit condo into your bedroom.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Put this on a flatbed truck, then give me a Tiberium Harvester, some Nod buggies, stealth tanks, and I'll be in business!
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Yeah... they let in light from that big bright orb in the sky... it follows me whenever I leave the house!
Now the rest of the country will look like Southern California-pink, beige, and stucco.
This guy is way out there
Looks like he'll have to extrude-a-server while he's at it.
Can't we just feed code from Second Life into this thing?
Man, don't go in the bathroom! I just "extruded a house."
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
However, while the slash summary mentions concrete, a quick survey of the CC site did not mention it, rather it mentioned metals, polystyrene, and polyester (Disco Stu loves his new polyester house.)
I can't wait for Adobe Housebuilder v8.0, I hear they've included support for incorporating a mini-bar into your new home!
I hope they haven't tried patenting this. I'm pretty sure that there's some prior art dealing with shitting bricks. In fact, I'd preemptively like to call this machine "The Brick-Shitter" in honour of the manner in which it extrudes cement.
With all due respect, though, this machine seriously does look like it could become an interesting tool for building developers. It's like a Rapid Prototyping machine on a grand scale. If it were made faster and more portable, it could be useable on large-scale structures. How feasable would it be to extrude a skyscraper?