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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."
The potential is to make them all completely different though. Just feed the robot a different model and you get a different house.
But what about windows? Having really contoured surfaces dont do so well if you want to put in a window, custom glass costs a boat load....
Not to mention they make awkward living spaces inside; it just seems that boxes work so much better in house design, although I would love curvature in the corner points in my rooms (a nice, soft, apple-like look).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Try getting something like this pushed past the trade unions. You might wake up with a horse head under your sheets.
Th
So it will only take a day to build a house, and with no human hands...but then, you still have to build a big gantry crane over the site, and set up the robot. This thing isn't going to do in-wall plumbing and electricity either. There would still be a LOT of work after the robot did its union minimum.
...
The potential is there, but it's there now. It isn't the construction costs so much as the design costs that result in all the houses in a given development being identical (other that rotated 90 degrees, or mirrored).
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
This would be nice for a home with no infratructure. How does it tie in to sewer lines, electric grids, etc? This isn't even mentioning teh internal infrastructure - all teh 14guage wiring, the three way switches, the copper feed and pvc drain pipes, etc.
Also, how does it get all the city bureaucrats on site in one day to do all the
This sounds like the flying cars we were all promised.
Sure it's cool that a robot might build a house in a day, but would you really want to live in it?
Personally, I'd rather have my house built by 100 Amish carpenters over the course of one year.
I may be a Luddite, in this respect, but I'm also a big believer in TLC.
- jbum
This seems to be a larger version (albeit by an order of magnitudes) of the kind of technology that has been employed in rapid prototyping and model making for manufacturing an other applications for quite some time. See, for example this and this.
I've finally got around to changing my sig
Since distance could be removed from the equation, how about the architect does the programming, and he or she could be anywhere in the world...
Great, now we're outsourcing construction jobs.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
The idea is cool for things that are extruded surfaces, but... how do you get any tinsile strength out of it? How do you put in vertical elements that are not concrete, but integrated into the structure? The site pre-casting idea is neat, but there isn't anything showing how it would stand up to seismic, or even strong wind loads. I know... work in progress.
It's actually very close to building with stone, only you use a liquid instead.
The rule of thumb is you should expect to spend 10 percent more if you're having an architect design your house. That means you'd add one percent if you made ten copies of each house. Many of said developments (generically, I call them hives) have only one to five different designs, so I wouldn't say the cost of design is in any way significant.
The major costs as far as I know are materials, labor, and land. Oh, and profit. Eliminating much of the labor cost would be great, except the price of houses doesn't seem to go down. I suspect what you'd do is increase the cost of one of the other segments (profit, probably).
Sure would be cool if you could getone of these gizmos from the Rent-All for the weekend and run up a new garage. I hope to see the site if it ever recovers....
Not unless someone screwed up. in poured structures, the reinforcement, wiring chases, plumbing, ventilation, all the things necesary to turn a structure into an office or home, are laid into the walls before the pour. Fixing a mistake later, by drilling for example. is hideously expensive, and has sent more than one contractor into bankruptcy.
The same guy is working on using plastics and metal also. The main innovation is his use of the moving extruder and trowels to smooth the surface of the object.
The moving extruder enables you to build items bigger than the tank of goo that previous laser powered rapid prototyping setups used.
The trowels let you produce a smooth finished item. Other systems result in a stack of disks (cross sections). To minimize the stack of disks surface, you make the cross sections very very thin but this means there are thousands of cross sections and it takes a long time. With the trowels you can spit out thick tubes and smooth it out later.
Other than houses they say you can build boats (not from adobe, duh, from plastic). Think of other smooth shells.
When this thing goes off patent in 20 years, I can see people setting up a robot in some big commercial garage building. You create a CAD design at home and bring it down to the garage. They extrude out an item and you bring it home. You can trade designs on the internet. Someone should start an Open Source design program now to be ready with a standard file format.
list things that would be easy to make.
Anything big hollow and plastic, ceramic or metal:
Plastic child's wading pool for the back yard.
Kids play set.
Kayaks, Canoes, snow sleds.
Garbage cans.
Patio Furniture
Frisbees
Hoola-hoops
Custom computer case mods could get really crazy.
Dishes or cookware?
Think of your own. It's fun.
I'll take a slightly different slant to most of the other responses.
I have nothing against cookie cutter houses, per se. A good design is a good design. There's a bit a movement now among the Navajo to start building tradtional hogans again, with modern materials, because, as it turns out, it's a good design, better than the modern house for where and how they live. The real problem with the houses in suburbia is that they regurgitate poorly made bad designs.
But at least they're vastly overpriced and wasteful, so they've got that going for them. They are what a local architect calls "cartoons" of houses.
Then you've got the houses that are at least well made, but nonsensically. The Cape Cod salt box built because it's a "style," but with absolutely no clue that it's shaped like that for a reason. You'll see these with the high face pointing northward and into the wind. Morons.
It's a house. It's supposed to house you. Make a nice one and don't worry about your indviduality over much. That's what your lawn ornaments are for.
But at least build a good house, not some crackerbox that's all expensive (but ugly), nonfunctional (or even counter-functional) facade and no substance.
In fact, salt boxes are very nice houses, if you face them south with their backs to the wind.
KFG
Houses look "cookie cutter" when they're new because the builders use all the same types of materials to save costs. They use "safe" colors to preserve their investment...and use a minimum of landscaping for the same reason (which is why landscaping your home is worth so much...regrading our overgrown lawn alone raised our appraisal nearly $10k).
These features that look "cookie cutter" to you probably look equally bad to the owners. As these houses age, their owners replace parts with new ones according to taste and function.
The result? A housing development that looks "cookie cutter" now will look completely different in 5 to 10 years. And by buying one of these ugly, conformist houses, you can often get a better deal that if you bought an older house for its "character" and sunk a few grand into fixing everything that's wrong with it.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I'd prefer a flexible inflated structure that could take a shot and get a small hole that I'd have a few minutes to patch, than a rigid vessel that could shatter from the impact.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Ahh. So that explains why the 120 year old house I grew up in seemed so flimsy and shoddy next to those hive-development houses.
And your right, around here almost all the labor speaks american, not english.
Building cookie cutter houses decreases cost, time to build, AND quality.
(for those keeping track, I was in the architecture/civil engineering track from 1979-1987)
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Is this really a smart thing to start replacing the human workforce with machines when our economy is so bad?
The coolness factor with innovations like this is quite high, I grant you - but should it be done? no.
Next you're going to say "It's just the way the world works - if you can't adapt, you don't survive." or more cruelly: "Carpenters are all unskilled labor anyway - it's not like we're putting smart people out of work."
Well - wrong and wrong.
Firstly, society has supplanted natural selection with social selection. In eras past, a person born with a birth defect wouldn't be able to survive, because they would get eaten by sabertooth tigers or some such - but now, we call them "differently abled" and help them out. We've realized that being human is more important than any so called "natural process".
Secondly, carpenters are highly skilled workers - they have to be engineers, machinists, mathmaticians - and they have to be somewhat physically fit to perform their duties.
Every time I see something like this in the news, I get a little more angry. All this means is that the rich man that owns the robots and rents them out to build houses gets richer, and the carpenter that used to build those houses now can no longer afford to feed himself or his family.
The idea of robots taking the toil out of life and turning the earth into a paradise is utter bullshit. Until the day comes when someone invents a "replicator" (like the ones on Star Trek's Enterprise) and makes all physical objects free of charge, robots replacing people will simply errode the world's middle class, polarizing the world into the very poor and the very wealthy.
Many very smart economists have said that the best yard stick for any society is measuring the population of it's middle class. Too many poor people, and you've got kenya or bangledesh. Too many rich people and inflation skyrockets, and suddenly money is worthless.
There's been piles upon piles of speculative fiction about this very topic. Everything from The Matrix to the backstory from Frank Herbert's Dune, the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica to Skynet from The Terminator.
Granted, all those examples are more than a little melodramatic - that's not the way it will really work. I'm thinking more of an economic wasteland similar to what was portrayed in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
A little note to anyone who still wants to argue - how will you feel when someone successfully creates a computer program than can successfully turn a plain English decription of a task into a working computer application that can do that task? How will you feel when someone replaces programmers and sysadmins with a robot?