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
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
... 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)
... 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!
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
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."
Gets omes leepZ onk!
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."
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."
"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.
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.