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Contour Crafting - Extrude-a-House

Posted by michael on from the just-mix-and-pour dept.

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."

10 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Suburbia by namidim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The potential is to make them all completely different though. Just feed the robot a different model and you get a different house.

  2. Dunno if the article says anything about it... by ciroknight · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

    --
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    1. Re:Dunno if the article says anything about it... by White+Shade · · Score: 3, Insightful

      curved corners are all well and good until you try to push your desk, bookshelf, bed or other boxy piece of furniture into the corner of your room... not all pieces of furniture (especially a bookshelf, for example) can have curvey edges in them, and you do limit your options to some extent ...

      curvey edges wouldn't do well on the floor/wall boundaries either, for the same reasons....

      curves are nice but they're not always practical.

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      ìì!
  3. I know a few strong guys who wouldn't like this by wizarddc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Try getting something like this pushed past the trade unions. You might wake up with a horse head under your sheets.

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    Th
  4. Yeah.... by cybermace5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  5. Plumbing, electric, etc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Plumbing, electric, etc by cryptochrome · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The sewer lines, at least, could be directly built into the walls and slab. No pipes required!

      Uh, I'm not so sure that's a good idea. Certainly not for concrete and adobe, which are both porous to a degree. And aside from that, I'd really feel better if my sewage was passing through a completely separate system.

      Anyway, a house printer would only have to leave the relevant gaps or channels in the wall for running utilities through. Or you could just drill in. Mind you, this is just for the overall shape of the house; the interior and exterior surfaces would probably be handled separately.

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      ---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?

  6. McHouse by jbum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  7. Rapid prototyping by rm007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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  8. Re:Suburbia by Phurd+Phlegm · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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 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....