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The House Building Machine
thelastguardian writes "With 400,000 American construction workers injured each year, and a typical American house takeing at least six months to complete, house building had been the same tiring gritty job for 20,000 years. For this problem, Behrokh Khoshnevis has a solution: A Robotic House Builder. An eight feet tall and six feet wide phototype house building machine, with ceramic mixing ability/computer control back-end, is currently building solid walls inside University of Southern California. To add to the excitement, even NASA is evaluating the machine as a builder on Moon using moondust- Who said moondust is useless?"
...because most likely a majority of the "400,000 Americans" injured in home construction projects are illegals / migrant workers. My fiancee, who works in a Walgreens, sees Hispanic construction workers coming in all time because they can't go to the hospital in fear of money or deportation or whatever. They would come in with nails in their hands and eyeballs, and would do all they can to try to get back to work as quickly as possible, because they know they can be replaced with other migrants with the snap of a finger.
So while construction conglomerates have a ready supply of migrant workers, there's little incentive to invest in robots to replace them. (Unless you're talking about making manufactured homes or something like that, then robots may make more sense).
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
There is much more to a house than 4 bare concrete walls.
You didn't RTFA, did you?
This machine doesn't just make "four bare concrete walls". It lays concrete in any shape that can be described by the CAD/CAM software driving it. For foundations, you lay the concrete in a wider pattern than you do for the walls. For service conduits, you leave channels to run them through.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The TV show The New Inventors featured a wall building robot last month:
. ht m
http://www.abc.net.au/newinventors/txt/s1300261
This is just what the suburbs needed, more identical boxes.
Of, for crying out loud! Why do moderators mark someone "insightful" when they obviously couldn't be bothered to RTFA?
This machine is like a stereolithography machine that works in concrete. If you don't want an identical box, then use a different design! It will extrude a concrete structure in any shape that the concrete can support.
With this technology, fully custom housing becomes affordable.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It has one big advantage, noise. A friend owned a condo that had concrete floors and walls. You never heard your neighbors and you could listen to music as loud as you liked without fear of annoying your neighbors.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Moon dust is really interesting stuff - so unlike anything we've got on earth. For one thing, it has iron in it - not iron oxide, but pure iron metal. It's sparse, but present. And it's already in a fine powder - you run the dust across a magnetic plate, and you've got a perfect material for powder metallurgy with almost no effort. Powder metallurgy takes very little infrastructure compared to, say, setting up an aluminum or titanium part production plant that takes in raw oxides. Powder-produced objects generally aren't as strong as cast objects, but you don't need as much strength on the moon, and you have a lot more freedom of what shapes you can produce with powder metallurgy.
And, of course, moon dust naturally does the "basics" - radiation shielding, thermal insulation, etc, if you pile enough of it on top of your buildings. There's also a lot of theoretical, but almost certain to work things that you can do with it. For example, you can ship epoxy or plastic powders for use as a cement for a moon dust "concrete", so that you send relatively little weight and get a lot of structural material out of it.
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
No, you didn't RTFA...
A wall alone does not make a house. A contour crafter would also need to insert plumbing pipes, electrical wiring, and ventilation ducts in walls as it builds them. The prototype can't do that, but Khoshnevis sees that as a trivial problem: "The second hand on your watch was placed robotically on a tiny shaft. Modern robotics can achieve tight tolerances and very high speeds. So having segments of tubing robotically inserted, put atop one another, and welded together as the wall goes up is really a no-brainer."
Or if you did, you didn't understand it....
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Actually, if you watch the videos, he does have some trivial ideas for dealing with electrical, plumbing and reinforcement.
w mv
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev/RP/CC/Utilities.
Thanks to CAD, new "factory" homes are very customisable. All the roof truss shops in our town use CAD, the broad design is done and the software does all the fiddly stuff and spews out a cutting list which gets fed to automated cutting and assembly equipment). My uncle (who works in construction) hates it because the designs get more and more complex each year, and he sometimes thinks that the designers are "playing video games" rather making simple, solid weather proof roofs.
As for walls, he's more impressed with the lightweight foam modules. Rather than lugging and lifting heavy, potentially dangerous stuff around, you build something from large foam blocks and then pump it full of concrete.
Both methods will (for a long while I'll bet) be more practical and of higher quality than on-site methods like the wall builder: Builder assemble light weight foam foundations that are then filled with concrete (pumped in), then an automated crane (think those log harvesters) lifts in and secures prefab sections.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
A simple concrete poured house (single-story on pre-poured slab), or poured wall foundations can be done in a weeks time easy. The most time consuming part is laying the forms, and having all outside wall pipes, conduit, etc. in place before the pouring. The actual pouring takes about a day. takes 48-72 hours to set depending on weather, and will take a lifetime to cure. Insides are still stick framed, and roofing are engineered trusses.
Brick walls?? A brick house these days is just brick siding covering up the stick frame. Theres actually an airgap in between the bricks and framing, the bricks don't even help in the support of the house, and the house doesn't help in the support of the bricks. Brick siding can take up to a week to complete and is usually close to one of the last things done on a home during the finish phase. BTW in hurricane areas, there are usually reinforcing straps worked into the brick walls for obivious reasons.
A stick frame house, or wooden as you call it, can go from a slab/already set basement to finish rough in about a week or less. The point the grandparent poster was trying to make, and that you missed, is that "the roughing in period" when the frame of a structure goes up is usually the quickest part of the build. The final phase of the building or finishing out part is the MOST time consuming part of the build, period.