Slashdot Mirror
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?"
That's amazing! It makes me feel naight beeg doow wop wohah!
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
USC is in a poor part of town. I imagine in time they'll want to use these robots to fortify the walls of the campus to keep everyone else out...
Too funny.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
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.
Man, Neight feet tall, that's humongous! Almost ine feet!
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.
sig: Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not
Wake me up when we've got robots who can stand in line for us at the unemployment agency.
Benefits aren't all that great, but at least there's no hard manual labor.
This think looks like a giant plotter, I bet if they did something like this in Japan it would involve 50 foot Mecha. At the very least it could have looked like that mover off Aliens.
once we have the robots that make robots and the robots that make factories and the autonomous gun shooting robots then we may have some trouble in the near future. I doubt the construction bot will do much because the unions will halt it. it would just remove too many jobs.
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.
If we were smart we'd keep creating jobs. We could be building millions of housing units on mars now if we shuttled thousands of robots, and we need humans to design the house and remotely control the bots.
thelastguardian asks: Who said moondust is useless?
I don't know about useless, but these crazy people seem to think lunar dust is a dangerous, pressing concern!
The unofficial
We could also build underwater or underground before going into space. When can we start work on our underground or underwater cities? Being a construction worker will be fun again.
If you want a bare concrete wall 'house', fine. What about elec, water, sewage, cable lines? Fixtures? Foundation? There is much more to a house than 4 bare concrete walls.
Union contstruction workers work mon-thurs then on friday, they go and protest/picket the non-union company that got the contract for renovating our local college. I can't imagine workers being too thrilled with a robotic replacement.
... 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.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... but, wow:
... and a typical American house takeing at least six months to complete...
A neight feet tall and six feet wide phototype house building machine...
That's some amazing editing!
What if someone hacks into it and I wake up in the morning to find everything walled up? Computer controlled robots building stuff all over the place sounds scary.
Still, with the help of a few gold blocks those unemployeed builders could have a great career as Lode Runners, destroying all the bad walls for us.
There's another solution to this problem. Employ migrant workers from Mexico. No, this is not a troll/joke. This is just how it works whether you like it not. Been to North Carolina lately ? I'm not sure how this has happened and why there are so many Mexican's in that state but they're saturating the construction market, it's unreal. They're not paying into unemployment insurance or getting health benefits, but they work tirelessly and cheap.
Who needs high tech inventions when low-cost illegal manual labor solves the problem at a fraction of the cost ?
These guys are proping up our housing market and overall economy and we give em how much respect ? Yep, we've got the minutemen on the border trying to snipe them as they cross over.
mhey took our jobs!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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).
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
how does it lay down windows?
I've been working for that company for a while now. Its not bad, but the cafeteria keeps running out of spoons.
You'd have to be VERY creative not to make there very ugly.
I can say this becuase I used to be one.
I wonder how long it will be before humans have no jobs left to do
... politicians as well as C-person instances in charge of global players) realize that "consumers" are an extinct species.
Not sure about the date, but it will be before "system builders" (erm
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
...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.
I bet they could find *someone* to live there, in a sort of beta-test of the thing. Heck, build me one and I'll live there on vacation. :-)
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.
I Love Alberta Beef
Just as long as when they start building walls on their own, they don't take the practices of some of my sims playing friends. They have a tendency to build walls, but no doors.
------------
I for one welcome our new wall building overlords.
The TV show The New Inventors featured a wall building robot last month:
. ht m
http://www.abc.net.au/newinventors/txt/s1300261
I'd really love to believe that, but I don't think the powers that be will let that come true.
Gets omes leepZ onk!
I built a cedar shed in my backyard today. I could have purchased a pre-made one for the same price, but I had a great time building it myself with a pile of wood, nails, a plan, and the help of my father in law. It's good to be active. It's good to work hard once in a while.
It'd have to be more along the lines of Habitat for Humanity...
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."
"A billion people today do not have adequate shelter," he says. Using soil dug from the building site and stabilized with cement, the contour crafter could erect inexpensive dwellings customized to a family's needs.
Oh yeah, it's obvious that a robotic house builder is the only solution for all those poor people living in tents. Can it make coffee from cow dung?
Nobox: Only simple products.
Could this result in a move to a more socialist government?
In Soviet Russia, the robots are the proletariat.
fsh
With thousands of bloggers injured each year, and a typical news post taking many minutes to edit, review, dupe check, spell check, grammer check and post, blogging has been the same tiring, gritty job for the last few years. For this problem, Commander Taco has a solution: Slashbot2000 A Robotic Slashdot Editor. An eight foot tall by 6 f oot wide prototype post editing machine. With a built-in coffee and espresso maker, hot pocket toaster and ceramic commode, "It's just the thing we hard working editors at your beloved Slashdot need" Commander Taco commented during the plugging-in ceremony. "To add to the excitement, the Slashbot2000 will have most it's editorial functions disabled and will be posting stories under current editors logins. We're offering 5 mod points to whoever can point out 20 successive stories posted by the Slashbot2000 unit" When asked what his new duties would entail after the plugging-in ceremony, Commander Taco curtly replied "MMMMM.... hotpockets".
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...
While there is no truly safe job, construction can be pretty dangerous. On the up side, it's sometimes pretty decent paying for blue collar work.
I think the effort needs to be put into safer construction tools. Nail guns, circular saws and table saws are all good places to keep improving. There's a guy trying to sell a design that stops a rotating blade in milliseconds but the table saw makers simply aren't interested, despite the current litigious environment and the fact that table saws are the #1 source of injuries.
Firstly how about rather than wasting lots of time building fancy robots to do the job, introducing proper health and safety regulations and *ENFORCING* them?
Secondly you are never going to eliminate injuries completely. Even in an office environment you get injuries; paper can cut quite badly. Therefore the figure of 400,000 injured workers is meaningless, as there is no indication of the seriousness of the injuries, and neither is there any indication of the number of people working in the industry.
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."
Though I have had some really tough "gourmet" cheese before...I wouldn't want walls made of it.
Still IMing in the stone age?
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 !!
Here ya go...here's your concrete bunker.
Yes, if such a thing becomes big (which I doubt, based on no evidence whatsoever), then there will be higher unemployment in this field, and the number of people replacing them in other fields (fields related to these robots) will probably be less. But, society has survived through plenty of changes much bigger than this.
At work, we're facing a similar problem. We're a newspaper, and we have an online edition. Currently, we have a database driven system for articles, each with a unique ID. so basically every article looks the same. However, the main section pages are done by hand each time, for customability and design purposes. Next year, though, our tech department (which is highly undeserving of the name, from one geek to all you) wants to have even that portion of the site be all automatic DB driven templates. It would cut out between 3-4 man hours a night, but it would lose all customabilty, all uniqueness. It's a decision we face, and it seems similar to this problem of cranking out identical decisions. When do we let efficiency override creativity and uniqueness?
Right now the prototype builds a wall which is pretty cool. But how well will this scale to a whole house (or row of houses as the article claims)? Will you need to keep on replenishing its supply of bricks and cement? There still has to be some amount of labour getting this stuff to the machine in such a way that the machine can actually use it.
...is what we really need. Some sort of device that scans text for common spelling errors--perhaps even grammar errors--and corrects them. A robot that could check spelling. It will never happen...
But imagine if it did... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these--no word need ever be misspelled again!
But seriously, folks. Plastic.com has a built-in spell-checker. Why doesn't Slashdot, at least for the editors? Or, better yet, why don't we have literate editors?
NASA is evaluating the machine as a builder on Moon using moondust- Who said moondust is useless?
Sorry if this is redundant, pain to look over all previous comments.
My answer to the question is:
"Everyone who will end up dying because moondust walls fail. Meteorites?"
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
"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.
And that's where you are wrong, you see, I am currently developing a means to utilize the unused processing cycles of the human brain (and for the average slashdotter like yourself, that's quite a few) to allow for unimaginably parralel computing power. This massively distributed neural computing network will in turn assist in the development of a new form of energy procurement which will allow for a cheap and infinitely renewable energy supply allowing the exponential expansion of our robot workforce and robot armies.
This will culminate in a new society where the average citizen will no longer physically work, but instead recieve e-credits for computing cycles performed in the comfort of our many power-station multiplex theatres.
Robots building houses? That's swell but even better would be robots building houses who are actual robots!
Then Professor Frink's plan will be a reality:
Professor Frink: Well, as you can see, when the burglar trips the alarm, the house raises from it's foundations and runs down the street, round the corner to safety... *house burns*
Seriously though, the reason its so important for us to sort out this whole filesharing mess now is not because of music or movies, but because the day when 3d fabricators because cheap enough to be the 2nd home printer is fast approaching. When you can fabricate anything, and all you need is a file from a filesharing network, what will happen to the economy?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I knew /. tended to be slightly slower in posting stories than many of the the smaller, more agile blogs out there, but a year and a month late is just a bit much.
Habitat for Humanity houses are not free by any stretch. Money + sweat equity.
It could do great things on earth too:- Surely as part of an automated construction process the added cost of custom designs will be exactly that - the cost of a new design. The actual manufacturing process has no added costs for unique designs assuming that they use similar material content - ie overall size. This sounds like an opportunity for suburban estates in which each house is built to a different design - and hurrah to that! The contouring process allows for curved outer and inner surfaces with any amount of detailed patterning, the machine could easily construct flying buttresses and emplace ready made gargoyles along your guttering should you be interested in that mediaeval cathedral look. Remember that we are moving from the age of uniformity of automated production to the age of uniqueness of automated production.
If the interest in the use of mass production line robotic jeans making machines to make unique designs to your measurements is anything to go by, then there should be plenty of interest from people wanting to buy a custom designed house that they themselves have designed - or at least chosen the design of. This becomes a more viable proposition when you have a mass house production robot that completes the process quicker and at lower cost than current methods.
I can see this technology being adopted by the builders of high values properties as well as use in quickly building shells for low cost housing in disaster areas. On the other hand as with so many breakthroughs in technology it could be 15 years before the process is in mainstream use...
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I counted nthree different spelling errors!
You've got to be kidding me!! Come on Moderators! The guy obviously did not read the whole article. It clearly states that they have already thought about how to implement the elec, water, sewage, cable, etc.
The vessels used for the molten steel contain an inner lining of "fireproof" bricks (to avoid melting the vessel. Despite the "fireproof" quality of those bricks, this masonry still needs to be redone quite often.... and, guess what,... nowadays robots are used for this task!
If I understand you correctly (I may not since I'm an "average slashdotter" as you put it), then they new society you invision terrifies me.
According to your plan, the more brain cycles you provide the richer you get... Unfortunately, it will be the stupid people getting richer, the unimaginative dull minded people... and since money gets you power, it will be these people in power... controlling the robot armies. As we all know, stupid people leading large armies is not a good thing.
I Love Alberta Beef
Hazleton, Pennsylvania??
Aren't one of these houses protected? And didn't F.L.Wright design one of these homes?
I swear I saw this whole thing on tv before.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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"
This thing is a whole NEIGHT feet tall?!?!! Damn, I didn't even know there was such a big number. Well heck, I often can't remember what comes after three in countin'. But neight feet tall... That must be pretty big!
With the proper use of AI (sim-city type + GA and/or Neural nets for aesthic testing), architecture and city-planning libraries and simulations, it should be possible to automate the construction of entire cities (even finding aesthic placements near natural resources).
One could imagine sending these things out to distant worlds far in advance of our arrival.
When we arrive to our new utopia, we can just add a reactor or two, turn the lights on and move in, en mass.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Simply put, if you replace people with robots, you have to either accept job losses, or ramp up production and move those people into supervisory jobs. If the people aren't suitable for supervisory jobs, or production at that level is unsustainable, there will be job losses.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that that's the way it is. Just look at the car industry for an example of people losing jobs to robots.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"So if I invented a magical cure which fixed all known diseases then I suppose I would be irresponsible because I'm putting all those medical professionals out of a job?"
Well, if your invention is truly "magical", then not only the medical folks, but the whole scientific community is going to have some explaining to do, as will religious leaders.
If your invention is not magical, well, major discoveries have been made before, and the world has gone on.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
> It's too bad they aren't sniping them.
And how many vigilante shootings do you think will go by before they face guerillas who shoot back?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Hmm, I'm not sure that all construction workers would be needed to supervise the robots. The vast majority would probably have to find new employment.
What amazes me, is why not edit minor spelling errors to at least make the archives search friendly.
A search for eight (or is it a new 8/9 number) prototype will not find this article.
Add an Edit: tag to say spelling fixed.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Pretty soon there will be more houses then people that are above the poverty level and can afford the.
Saw a device that does this already about a month ago on TV as seen here http://www.abc.net.au/newinventors/txt/s1300261.ht m
While having a robot build my house is pretty darn cool and all, I have to wonder what all the construction workers would do should this ever take off. I mean being a construction worker isn't exactly the ideal job - so where would that leave them? Or the economy for that matter? Millions of people suddenly unemployed? That sounds like the beginning of a revolt.
I guess its a sort of good thing that this will be vapoware, for now at least.
--
Registered .sig quotient : 1337
that cannot be bribed.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
American house takeing at least six
s/takeing/taking
A neight feet tall and six feet
s/neight/eight
wide phototype house building
s/phototype/prototype ?
as a builder on Moon using moondust
s/on Moon/on the Moon
Too bad they haven't invented a spell-checking robot yet.
Oh, wait...
Oh, and you'd have more brain power available for sale if you never used it for yourself. Great!
No one is going to beable to afford to live in the suburbs in a few years anyway. Oil prices are going up and up, driving to work is going to cost almost as much as you make in a day. Even with new discoveries of Oil demand is quicly out growing supply.
We are going to have to start living closer to where we work and shop.
Anyway building robots has been done, japan is already well ahead in this field.
This robot is quite useless, most of the work in building a home is the finshing work, roofing, wiring and plumbing. Who wants their entire house to be a damp basement anyway. I guess this is targeted at warm dry climates.
Now build a robot that can do drywall, plastering, sanding and painting and you would have something.
Bare wooden walls can already be factory made pretty dam quickly and go up in hours.
What we really should be focusing on is making homes really energy effiencnt and focus on more liveable apartment buildings.
God, root, what is the difference?
The system is quite infallable as it only uses non-utilized mental faculties and only performs computation, that is it accepts no executable instruction as input. So no host node can taint the computational process.
And as for the employees becoming wealthy... I can assure you that they would get little more than they wouuld have for an equal amount of hours working at Walmart. And besides... when the quality of life as a host in our system will be more enriching than anything they could aspire to out here, with e-credits worth a hundred fold online than in life, many will choose to keep their node online permanantly.
Perhaps you'd enjoy watching the promotional campaign for our juice-power operation to be put in place at all our power-plant multiplexes worldwide
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"
"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
anyone read that manga called 'Blame!'? it reminded me of the builders from that
if i'm not immortal, what's the point of living?
...te?
So the solution to te 400,000 American construction workers injured is to simply replace all contruction workers with robots. Problem solved not more injured construction workers.
Next they must start working on the unemployment issue.
Patent use of concrete extruder to make schools, use of concrete extruder to make offices. Patent making window holes using concrete extruder. Patent concrete extruder with stone chipping attachment. Patent concrete extruder with sharp corner making attachment. Patent concrete extruder with hole proder for making lighter walls.
Better still, wait a couple of years, patent making houses with a concrete extruder, attach it to your abandoned (really failed) earlier patent applications, wait ten years till nobody can remember who invented what then sue sue sue!
While the article does state that they plan to have the device lay pipes, wires and ducts as well as cement walls it is my experience that these are not where the cost of construction lies.
I'm currently nine months through an 11 month project to build a house and frankly the time spent raising walls and laying pipes has been small in comparison to the laying of the foundations and the huge number of "finishing" jobs. Without these the output of these robots may be functional but is doomed to look rather industrial.
These days the framing for a wooden house is designed on a CAD system, cut by robot, shipped in segments and can be erected in a day on a well laid foundation. Hanging internal doors takes nearly as long as putting the frame up!
Perhaps robots like this will catch on for rebuilding in disaster areas but until they can construct aesthetically pleasing cabinets and fix the architrave around a doorway I don't think they will have much utility in the mainstream construction business. For the jobs that it does this robot only replaces relatively cheap labour and getting in a bunch of guys with hammers has a significantly lower capital cost and is much more flexible.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Nobody says moondust is useless. It's one of the reasons to GO to the moon. First off, regolith is excellent radiation shielding; every lunar habitation plan from early sci-fi on includes burying the habitat.
Next, it has oxygen that can be liberated. Also, it's very rich in minerals. There are plans that have been worked up for years that take regolith and energy (from solar arrays or nuclear) and put high-grade iron, nickel and other elements out the other side, using some chemicals that are recovered in the process so it continues as long as you care to run it.
With this technology, fully custom housing becomes affordable.
Yeah! Now I can... now I can... oh wait, the bank/lender still won't give me a loan because this doesn't change my age (22), and they don't think I can make a house payment when I've never had a problem paying a rent payment on my apt for nearly 2 freakin' years.
does that make you a pedantophile?
Man, I can't believe all the luddites chiming in on this discussion.
Hey you're absolutely correct. In fact, all those people commuting from their homes to the cities in the morning could, in the future, be replaced with robots and there would be no more massive amounts of morning/afternoon casualties from those long commutes.
Man, stupid luddites, they're all dying just to make money.
"There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce." -Samuel Longhorne Clemens
Of course. And you should also thank all those criminals for keeping police officers, lawyers, judges, and jailors in job. Not to speak of the indirect jobs which come from building jails, court buildings and police stations, producing police cars and prisoner transport cars, making police uniforms and handcuffs,
So if you would find a way to completely stop crime, you'd clearly be irresponsible because you'd put many people out of work and even kill whole industries.
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There was an article in the February 2005 issue of Popular Science. The article was about Inkjet technology being used in new ways. For example, a 3d printer to prototype new products, and this house "printer". The house printer is buried on the third page if you are only interested in that part of the article
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
So, we need:
A robot to grade the site - level the dirt off.
A robot to dig the foundation.
A robot to do the walls (in progress).
A robot to do the interior finish work.
A robot to do the exterior finish work.
And a really ANNOYING robot to run around with a megaphone yelling at all the other robots "Four Hours! We only have FOUR HOURS until the family gets back!" and "Mr. Robotic Bus Driver - MOVE THAT BUS!"
--
Seriously, give the amount of pre-fabrication that can be done on a conventional house now (wall segments, roof joists, and floors built at the factory and shipped out), I wonder if a concrete extruder is the best way to go - perhaps building a human-controlled crane with more dexterity to raise the pre-fab wall sections, and a computer-controlled wall-nailer, and so on would be a better approach to achive rapid and cost-effective house construction than a house-sized 3D litho rig.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Weren't we all meant to be wondering what to do with all our spare time and excess money now, according to the happy predictions of the 1950's?
Comfortable squalor may well beat being on call all the time and always striving for cheaper & faster...
Here's a New Scientist article talking about the same guy and the same technology. The only thing that's new is the fact that NASA is considering it for moon bases.
"News for Nerd. Stuff that's over a year old"
Yeah, just like cars have become really affordable now that they've automated the manufacturing process with robotics. Maybe next they'll automate beer production to make it almost free.
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.
Hell, I don't want to live in some "house" extruded from solid block of concrete. Get in there if you like, just forget me. Good old european style brick houses, that's for me. Well, if I'd be in Florida I'd stick with wooden bungalows, that's more easy to rebuild year after year - ok, sorry, that's not that funny.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
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.
In the article text, he admitted that there would still be work done by humans -- hanging doors, installing windows and such.
Not sure whether you'd be able to get 300 hours out of it, though.
Edison was building "pre-fab" concrete homes in 1907. But his ultimate design was singularly ugly and dispiriting even as low-income housing. The simplest of household repairs and remodeling were a nightmare. Why Dolores Chumsky Hates Thomas Edison
I have a co-worker who is heavily into Habitat, and one of the main tenets is sweat equity. If we have robots building the things, where is the ownership?
I'm into Habitat myself because I believe that 'low rent' housing is practically a crime in the U.S. (Pay as much per month as a home loan, never have anything to show for it).
There's plenty of ownership to be had here due to the limitations of the system. In some sense, it's ideal. Build a shell quickly and cheaply. Now that the very most basic requirements are met, the sweat equity comes into play. There's still windows, doors, wiring and plumbing, drywalling and fixtures as well as painting.
Not only does that provide ownership, it takes a stock design and personalizes it so that no two homes are exactly alike. Meanwhile, since the shell provides basic shelter, the family could actually move in while still finishing it so part of their rent money can go for materials. This also leaves plenty of opportunity for family members to learn useful trade skills.
Let's see, can someone tell me the difference between our jobs being outsourced to India, or construction workers' jobs being outsourced to robots? According to the no-real-credibility self-proclaimed economists, the major thing fueling the "recovery" is housing.
So, if they loose their jobs, who the fsck is working in this country, other than nurses' aides, pizza deliverers, burger flippers, and CEOs?
mark
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.
In the early 1900's the Sears Catalog used to sell build-it-yourself houses for around $2000. A lot of them are still inhabited.
This robot squirts 4" wall increments. Gimme a break...
/. coverage.
Germany has styrofoam blocks that set-up entire house walls in one day. Of course, US UBC precludes its use.
The 24 Hour House Project, San Diego 1983, is proof that it is not lack of technology holding back cost or productivity.
Styrofoam isn't sexy, requires no skill and eliminates jobs. Robotics is just sexy, hence
No one said it was useless. They said it's potentially dangerous. Geez, didn't you RTFA you linked to?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Simply put, if you replace people with robots, you have to either accept job losses, or ramp up production and move those people into supervisory jobs.
Yes. It's a giant filtering process, that filters the adaptable smart people to the top, and drops the duds down to the bottom.
It isn't that hard to be a WalMart greeter, and there's room for improvement in the performance of the greeter function at WalMart.
So what's the problem again??
No one is going to beable to afford to live in the suburbs in a few years anyway. Oil prices are going up and up, driving to work is going to cost almost as much as you make in a day. Even with new discoveries of Oil demand is quicly out growing supply.
Actually, nobody will be able to afford, or want, to drive to the city in a few years.
I see a growth market in technology to break up all that cement and plant grass and gardens in the former cities.
It'll suck to own all that formerly valuable Urban land, but then the city types have had their time to harvest profit.
And when an earthquake, followed by a flood, occurs, we'll just stand up on the surface scratching our heads and figuring out where to install the diving board on our new swimming pools.
I guess the guy who sells sump pumps will make out alright.
There is only one way and that is for the government to build these houses
Whoah! That sounds neat. Can I live in a house built by the kind of people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles?
The kind of workers this would displace aren't exactly highly paid or highly skilled workers. The money saved by the more efficient work will open up plenty of extra jobs for unskilled labor. Maybe instead of constructing a McDonalds they'll have to ask people whether or not they want fries with that, but at least they'll have air conditioning.
Those with more skill would still be needed. Sure, a robot might be able to handle a straight course of brick or block, but most houses I've seen have windows and doorways. Yes, a skilled mason will have to adapt and learn how to direct robots rather than laborers, but that's something which can be done.
Until we actually achieve strong artificial intelligence even an unskilled worker is going to have something he or she can do better than a computer. When true AI comes around this will of course change, but the whole economy is going to go through a tremendous overhaul at that point anyway. Depending if you take the optimistic or pessimistic view it means either that we'll no longer have to work at all (for a living, anyway) or that we'll become slaves to the machines themselves. But either way, we're not there yet, and having machines that can do specific tasks like builing houses if anything brings us closer to the optimistic point of view.
They'd still have to pass inspection to be lived in, so it's not as if the walls are going to cave in and kill everyone simply because it was built by a robot. If the build quality sucks, it'll be condemned unless it's correctable.
Well crap.
I'll never use humans to build my house again, that's for sure -- I bet those robot built homes don't leak like mine does.
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.
Injured as they may be, they at least had a paycheck with which to feed their families.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Thank you. You said that perfectly.
These contour crafters have come up in the news several times in the past couple of years, and as an architectural student they always make me shudder. The point being, as the grandparent mentioned, that contour crafters "extrude a concrete structure in any shape that the concrete can support" but only in shapes that concrete can support. Concrete is a fantastic material and has a lot of different design possibilities, but it still has serious limits. Good architecture responds to its environment and concrete is simply not the best choice for every environment. Imagine you're designing a beach house -- no matter how many windows you punch through the concrete wall, you'll never be able to capture a sense of light and airiness from the solidness of concrete. Glass and wood and metal have so much more flexibility in this situation.
My other objection to contour crafters is that I would not want to live in a house whose concrete exterior is printed "in a brick, shingle, or clapboard pattern" and whose interior is painted "using ink-jet technology," as Mr. Khoshnevis muses in the article. This sounds horribly artificial and sterile -- not to mention plain ugly. And I strongly suspect that the fakeness of these finishes would appall even the type of Modernist architect who is most likely to design for concrete and otherwise embrace this technology. Modernism is all about rejecting the arbitrary styles of the past and building using a material's real nature -- dainty little stamped shingles have nothing to do with the nature of concrete. So contour crafters, at least as Mr. Khoshnevis is envisioning them, end up alienating just about all design-oriented architects, from the traditional to the Modernist. (The type of architect who is only interested in throwing up big-box retail outlets or new subdivisions is another matter.)
None of these objections stop this from being a very exciting technology. I just hope they keep improving it for at least ten years before they use it to make anyone's house. And I hope that they retain humans to install these houses' finishes. There are simply some things that no machine (no machine built in the foreseeable future, at any rate) can do as well as humans can.
The current budget and trade deficits are about to come to a head. Basically, to keep attracting money to the states, the prime interest rate will have to rise above 10%. When it hits 5%, and home interest rates hits 9%, then construction to come a real crawl.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Queen Victoria died in 1901. In 1910 the UK had two monarchs, Edward VII (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, died 6 May), and George V (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, changed name to Windsor). So I guess your house is more rightly known as Edwardian, or Georgian. Me, also sitting in a Georgian house I suppose - 1729 built, George II :-)
Making cement housing shells just isn't that hard. Edison did this a century ago, using moulds that lock together. It's done routinely for industrial b buildings. If there was any market for concrete houses, it would be done for them.
Right. Tell that to the plumbers, electricians, tapers, etc.
Maybe you could build a bunker. Or a house in a country where simple, cement-block houses are acceptable, but in those instances it isn't the labor that's in short supply, it's the materials.
In fact, all those people commuting from their homes to the cities in the morning could, in the future, be replaced with robots and there would be no more massive amounts of morning/afternoon casualties from those long commutes.
You say that as though it's a bad thing. Sure, it might require some changes in the economy, but a world where no one is required to work is a good thing.
In a factory, it is possible to automate a tremendous amount of things because the factory is always in the same place and the functions are all the same. One piece is machined and another one parallel to it and their pallets borught over to another area and then welded and then that assembly attached to another and so on. Parts are supplied just as needed to each device or the device goes nowhere. A lathe cell is programmed to expect stock of a given size, not random sizes. Etc.
The way to do it with houses would be to create a giant multi-bot factory with gantry assemblies and so on and one by one, load stock, machine the stock, fasten in place. Then transport the finished house (by whatever means someone can) to its site and connect it to the utilities.
Onsite robotics will eventually fail before the problem that all robots for production would fail before: inconsistant environment. The technological advancements needed to make it work would almost obviate their reason for being in the first place. It makes more sense economically to have all the automation in a controlled environment.
I'm waiting for nanotech and genetic engineering and understanding of molecular biology to come together where we grow biomechanical houses that process our sewage output, absorb ambient energy and store it, and are self-healing. Some day, we might have cities that take in more pollution than average cities of today put out.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Except from the point of view of religious zealots and others would seek to control people. A job -- either actually useful and in demand, or "make work" artificial -- keeps people busy and usually under somebody's thumb.
Some people really believe that "idles hands are the devils tools", but IMO, future self-sufficiency (with nanotech and other huge efficiencies) will eventually allow for a leisure society as long as the theocratic tragedian "suffering is good" idea doesn't get in the way.
Power to the Peaceful
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
You know we have to leave that to the chicks. If we do it, or by proxy have our robots do it, we will catch hell...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
They'd still have to pass inspection to be lived in, so it's not as if the walls are going to cave in and kill everyone simply because it was built by a robot. If the build quality sucks, it'll be condemned unless it's correctable.
;-)
Assuming of course that the beta is performed in a responsible jurisdiction, which the gp post did state. However the beta could be performed in a developing area of the world with less strict codes. On the other hand it could be performed in a area with very strict building codes. Are the Laws of Hammurabi (18th century BC - Babylon) still enforced?
233. If a builder build a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and a wall cracks, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
229. If a builder build a house for a man and does not make its construction sound, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.
So who gets the death penalty? The robot, an engineer or programmer?
It takes weeks to schedule all those inspections.
Hey, I just had an idea. A robotic building inspector.
I wonder how this will affect the Market. Maybe not significantly since value is usualy based on land location and availability.
I guess a new question for house valuators would be, "Which model 'house making machine' built this house?"
We're a whole lot closer than you think. I've already figured out how to program AI. But who th hell would buy an idea? or, would they offer me more than $500.00 ? Would you like to have a floating home, untouched by earthquakes, able to float higher if a tsunami threatens? I've got a lot of people laughing at my page if you'd like to laugh too, but the page stays up because I do, in fact, know how to generate an upward force enough to easily overcome gravity: http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm . It's going to get real interesting when a foreign government offers me enough money, and the U.S. slides into 2nd or 3rd Place. But it's a free market. U.S. has more investment money of anyone in the world. It's just the investment people think they can get what they want for a song. And they're wrong.
This whole article is nothing but wishful thinking from some guy in a lab anyway. Sure, we'll have robots that build houses some day, but not because there's an eight-feet modified shelf filler in a lab somewhere.
Building a house involves a LOT more than piling up bricks and cement. You have:
- plans to understand and interpret
- foundations to dig
- different kinds of brick and inner and outer layers of brick
- different patterns of brick, and the obvious need to handle corners, curves, and interconnections between different walls
- flooding of foundations and other weather issues to cope with
- flooring
- plumbing
- window sills and other huge non-standard "bricks" that this machine couldn't cope with
- reinforcements
- roofing: rafters, insulation, tiling/slating/felting/cladding/thatching/glazing
- window installation
- door hanging
- plastering
- joinery
- electrical wiring
- probably lots of other things I can't recall right now...
This "robot" is about as close to building a house as an electric drill is to being an automated carpenter.Agreed; well said. Also, people have been imagining since (at least) the dawn of industrialisation that machines would give us more leisure time. Instead, they have driven us to compete more and more, so that we now work all sorts of ungodly hours. Some people are even losing the distinction between working and not working, with taking their work home, being contactable at all hours of the night, etc.
By contrast, the average citizen in a tribal culture works for only a few hours a day. And we think we're helping ourselves with all these cool "labour saving devices" :(
The #1 problem in all of human history has been putting roofs over people's heads. Unfortunately the problem hasn't been the cost of labor but the cost of building materials. If a robot built a wall 3000 ft long and 10 ft high, it would take under $30,000 for the robot and $5,000,000 for the concrete.
The problem isn't making a robot to build structures but making a robot to generate the building materials for less money than it's taken for all human history.
Personally, I think it would take a lot of magic technology to get machines up to the level where they might decide to eliminate humanity in general, or to take over, but then again, it's amazing how prescient some Sci-Fi authors are. Look at Heinlein in The Door to Summer and how his protagonist invents a robot recognizable as the Roomba in the first few chapters. Of course, he had the character do so in 1970...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The caption under a photo in the article seeks to address concerns that the machine will build "concrete bunker" houses:
Khoshnevis believes that the varied shapes created by a miniature version of the contour crafter herald a revolution in architecture. "You will see houses, neighbor-hoods, and cities that look very different," he says.
This caption accompanies a photo of swirly shapes cranked out by the tabletop version of his wall-builder, suggesting that someday we can all run out and design cool spiral-shaped Custom Future Houses.
However, there is a little problem with this vision of artistic utopian housing called "financing". Banks LIKE cookie-cutter bunker-style housing. Speaking as someone fighting banks and appraisers to get financing for a relatively standard-looking custom home, I can tell you that even very minor deviations from "the same house everybody else already has" will make it nearly impossible to finance a homebuilding project.
Those freaks who live in converted 747 fuselages and water towers didn't pay for their weird domiciles with the help of a banker. I can't imagine this wall-builder will magically reduce construction costs to the point that nobody needs mortgages. Examples of people getting a banker smack-down are easy to find -- ask around, you'll discover you probably already know somebody who had an interest in those octagonal domed houses that were in all the magazines in the 80's, for example, and those are relatively extreme cases.
Big business likes their houses built just like they love their cube-farms... neat and orderly and more or less identical...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005