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?"

Comments

First steps to a Von Neumann Engine

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if we can get machines to mine automated and then use them to construct factories that can create mining machines, our potential is incredible. Exponential growth by automated mining/construction is the future of space colonization.

one-piece houses

[fr1kk]

In my hometown, we have a corporation called Hobart. Back in the day (1930s-1950s) they made steel houses. They were all one piece as the left the shop, and were set up on site. Theres still about 15 of them left. It was the first time we ever got international headlines. These were no trailer homes either... think two story three bedroom / kitchen / living room. The only problem is once you get a crappy owner they can start to rust, and then you have to side it. It should be illegal.

Re:one-piece houses

[Rei]

So, you instead use aluminium. Easy solution there ;) A bit expensive back then, but no rust problems.

The problem with "factory built" homes, at least old-style, is that they were all the same model, and tended to be a bit... antiseptic. I like the methods I read about for using the methods used in shipbuilding - automatic fabrication of custom components by machines - to build custom houses out of conventional materials (or metal frame with conventional exteriors) as components that can simply be hooked together on-site.

Countour Crafting ...

[foobsr]

... with animations ... (up o 49MB :)

Quote:
Contour Crafting is a fabrication process by which large-scale parts can be fabricated quickly in a layer-by-layer fashion. The chief advantages of the Contour Crafting process over existing technologies are the superior surface finish that is realized and the greatly enhanced speed of fabrication. The success of the technology stems from the automated use of age-old tools normally wielded by hand, combined with conventional robotics and an innovative approach to building three-dimensional objects that allows rapid fabrication times. Actual scale civil structures such as houses may be built by CC. Contour Crafting has been under development under support from National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research.

CC.

Re:I wonder how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, once automation takes over there will be no supply part in the supply vs. demand equations. The economy will shrink while the quality of living increases. The only thing of value will be ideas. Computer programmers, CAD developers, engineers, etc. will be the ones who control the world. They will put their ideas into a computer and the machines will make it so. Anyone who cannot contribute in this way will live a life of comfortable squalor (if you think that having almost any material possession that you want but not being able to do anything useful with your life is squalor).

Re:I wonder how long...

[ispepalocacoc]

I'm hoping the day when humans have no jobs is soon. It's not like we're all going to go poor or something... If no one has a job then no one has money... but theoretically we also wouldn't have to pay for anything since robots would be doing all the work.