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.
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.
... 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)
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.
... 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.
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
...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."
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
Using a Blue Print of Death.
The TV show The New Inventors featured a wall building robot last month:
. ht m
http://www.abc.net.au/newinventors/txt/s1300261
Gets omes leepZ onk!
Cept they are destroying the economy by taking those jobs. It's difficult to afford to pay reasonable salries when all your competitors fired their legal workers and now pay less than minimum wage to illegals, and when noone is hiring you unless you're an illegal it makes it damn difficult to get a job.
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."
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...
But how would you afford the mortgage if the price of the house was inflated 20% because they use only legal union workers ?
I'm not really trying to argue this way is right or that way is wrong but just point out how complex this situation is. On top of all of that is the fear mongering about the "Al Queda" infiltrating their way into America through the Mexican/U.S. border..
We enjoying a great housing market because of cheap migrant labour, should we not take advantage of it while it's there ?
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 !!
"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*
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
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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!