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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?"
My thoughts exactly. Humans getting hurt on the job is not a problem, as mistakes are an inherit part of being human. The future is a world of no middle class. Just a poor starving majority and an insanely rich minority.
I could see it all being done by robot. Prefab houses are not new, they have been around since the Levitt towns of the 1940's the houses might be assembled on production line in a factory then shipped to the site, then an assembly bot would work from there. the robot would just need to place all the components, probably on a predetermined foundation. as long as the peramiters dont shift much the bot shouldn't have too much trouble.
From TFA: 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
Yeah, it'll be trivial to take an 8' tall by 6' wide robot that lays concrete, and fix it up to dig and lay a foundation, run cable, wire, dry-wall, plaster, hang windows & doors, install carpet, install cabinets, etc. etc. A robotic housebuilder would essentially require a superstructure encompassing the house. The self-building cranes they use for high-rises are just for the I-beams - everything else is done by hand, and the frame for a house is the easy part - it goes up in a day or two for even the largest houses.
What about the small stuff? How is the robot going to keep the first wall plum while it starts on the second?
I think Dr. Khoshnevis needs to watch a few episodes of This Old House before calling anything trivial.
fsh
Surely this is one area where humans are cheaper than robots...
I just moved into a new block of houses (renting) a couple of months ago. 6 months sounds like a *very* long time - I've been here about 7 weeks and the brick homes that were just being started when I moved in are "almost" finished.
It would seem that the finishing is what takes the longest, though... fittings, wiring, plumbing, windows, tiles, carpeting, cabinets, kitchen, etc.
IIRC the frames went up in just days, roof/walls in a few weeks. A big new house was built next to my parents place; being a "kit home" it looked like a mostly finished house on the outside in less than a month...
Would it be better for those workers to be out of work, than to sustain injuries a couple of times in their lifetime?
Do a google search for "Broken Window Fallacy". The less labor needed for housing contruction (or any other particular task), the more people are available to do other work (net effect: more wealth in the economy).
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
More like, he wants to make it possible for more people to afford houses at all, and for people to afford better houses than they can with conventional construction methods today: Houses built by people whose job changes from risking life and limb, to supervising machinery that builds a better product faster.
Man, I can't believe all the luddites chiming in on this discussion.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Who the hell wants his house walls built only from concrete ?? It is the worst material - bad thermo isolation, heavy, and you can NOT tear down your house easily after its lifespan (do not lauhg, this IS often big problem!). Not to mention you are unable to do some small changes inside of your won house after 5 years, because IT IS ALL ONE BIG BLOCK OF CONCRETE !!
It'd be cooler if they'd find some people in that part of town who could beta-test the whole process, and live in a few of these houses. Like an automated Habitat for Humanity or something.
Your heart may be in the right place but like many ideas inspired by emotion it's not a good one. Keep the robots building walls on campus that are not used for anything, that can fail without endangering anyone. Don't beta test the robots building load bearing walls that may collapse on a family in the middle of the night.
Hmm, that would seem to depend upon the state of the economy. If those 400,000 are only able find other work at walmart or mcdonald's, I don't really see how this is a net gain. The same amount of wealth may be circulating in the economy, but the overall standard of living has been reduced.
If they are able to retrain and find work in a skilled field that pays as well as their prior position did then, yes, there is a gain.
The walls are the easy part.
I dunno, I'd suspect the walls are the hard part. I think of it like this: if you're building, say, a moon base, you send up a robot to build the raw structure and seal it all in. Then your astronauts can go up there and find a pre-built habitat waiting for them. All they need to do is add a little bit of wiring and plumbing and artificial atmosphere, but that'll be easy since they're already protected from the lack of atmosphere and whatnot. Or something like that.
"Of, for crying out loud! Why do moderators mark someone "insightful" when they obviously couldn't be bothered to RTFA?"
Because the moderators don't RTFA.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
We should not even consider this as a solution to our building problems. We should be building underground. We have the technology to build houses that will last for hundreds of years and use a fraction of the energy we use today. When a hurrican or a tornado hits where we live we would only have to stay indoors that day. Total cost of ownership divided by the several generations that would live in the house would be alot less than what people pay today for their houses. Today there is no way we can spread the cost of a building over several generations. No one is willing to invest in a building with return of investment being over a hundred years. There is only one way and that is for the government to build these houses and charge rent on how well the house is maintained by the people renting it.
The thing about this is that it doesn't really do anything. Building a house is not just building a wall. This is like pouring a concrete wall that only takes two days out of the 90 day process. This machine will have to be setup, fed materials, cleaned, taken down, and transported to the next site. It does absolutely nothing new, it only does it in a more complex way.
To paraphrase:
...
"Yeah, we should really ban tractors because they put all those farmers out of work! Now the farmers will have to try and find a job at Walmart or McDonalds!"
"Yeah, we should ban nail guns because they put all the hand nailing carpenters out of work!"
Repeat ad infinitum
You don't see how this is a net gain? See, new wealth is created by more efficient use of resources and labor, which leads to the overall standard of living increasing.
Improvements that put people out of work and force them to use their labor in more valuable ways is why we don't still all live in one room huts with an outhouse or ditch.
Go read a book about Basic Economics before you ever comment on anything economics related again!