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."

Comments

Re:Suburbia

[namidim]

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

I know a few strong guys who wouldn't like this

[wizarddc]

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

Yeah....

[cybermace5]

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.

Plumbing, electric, etc

[Anonymous Coward]

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.