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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."
Matt Helm did this in 1967 in his movie with an inflatable bedroom.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Fortunately, I downloaded the movies and made a BitTorrent version available:Enjoy.
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If you go to the technical paper, take a look at figures 5 and 8. Now a quote from page 3 of the same paper: Utility Conduits: As shown in Figure 5 utility conduits may be built into the walls of a building structure precisely as dictated by the CAD data. Sample sections made with CC and filled with concrete as shown in Figure 8 demonstrate this possibility.
Patent Pending. I'm serious. These guys have already thought of and nearly solved the piping and electrical infrastructure problems. But just haven't publicly unveiled it. I sat in on a talk here at USC by Dr. Khoshnevis.
The bureaucratics issue came up also. That one is going to be very tough. In the mean time, his applied focus is on adobe house construction in rural areas and third worlds. Oh yeah, and extraterrestial buildings (assuming we can make mud on Mars/Moon).
Anm