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3D Printers To Build Houses
gbjbaanb writes to point out an article in the Sunday Times describing two separate programs where robots are being developed to build houses. The Los Angeles project is farther along than the one in the UK, but the article provides more details on the techniques employed in the latter. Liquid concrete and gypsum will be sprayed from nozzles in a manner analogous to an inkjet printer. From the article: "The first prototype — a watertight shell of a two-story house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site — will be erected in California before April. The robots are rigged to a metal frame, enabling them to shuttle in three dimensions and assemble the structure of the house layer by layer. The sole foreman on site operates a computer programmed with the designer's plans... Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. 'This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,' said [an architect involved with the UK project]. 'Anything you can dream you can build.'"
As soon as HP hears about this, we'll have $15,000 Housejet cartridges.
What happens when the "ink" clogs?
Philosophy.
But how to you turn gypsum into windows?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"Anything you can dream you can build."
That seems overly optimistic. I think there are a few laws of physics that would disagree.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Is the "printer" going to print out liquid gypsum plumbing and electrical work as well? I actually had to cancel my contract on a house because the builder laid out the plumbing a foot off, which to them was no big deal. I was lucky I caught them and did my own measurements after the slab was poured, otherwise I would have had a ticking time bomb regarding the plumbing and possibly severe drainage problems.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
... also painters, electricians, interior decorators, glaziers, etc.. This system seems to miss out most of the fiddly, expensive jobs.
How does it put the layer of insulation in the wall cavities? Is there a way of producing foamed concrete? That would be cool.
Finally "possibly even wallpaper". This is a really bad idea. I used to live in the Barbican in London, which used textured concrete surfaces for the walls of its stairs and communal areas, and my knuckles still bear the scars
Reduce, reuse, cycle
But now, they can just have a computer give them a BSOD.
What happens if you print a test page? Does it build a giant HP logo?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
... is ahead, but less advanced. From the article it seems the Loughborough one can create more complicated designs, and include all the functional aspects of the house (ducts, etc.). It takes longer, but you actually get a house after it's done :)
A few links could of course have helped this article... I think contourcrafting.org seems to be more or less the right page for the California project. The videos and animations are quite worth seeing.
For the Loughborough one, the closest I could come up with was Dr Soar's website...
How are the Maf*a et al going to hide their bodies now if the concrete side of things is automated? Actually, thinking about it things could go the other way for them. Concrete shoes sir? What style? Any particular heel?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
After watching the video of a 3D printer posted a few days back, I don't really understand how they do the top of things. What do they do when the top is flat. I can understand the floor, but does the top of everything else above the floor have to be a dome? Will it be like living in Tatooine? (Tunisia?) Dome I understand, but how does a spray of concrete/gypsum defy gravity long enough to set flat?
:-/)
(I'm hesitant asking this question, it might be blatantly obvious to everyone but me.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
It's true that these won't produce fully fledged ready to move into homes, but it's still a start isn't it? Providing the quality is good then I'm all in favour of moves like this.
I have a couple of domestic robots, the Roomba and Scooba. I still need a vacuum cleaner and a mop, but only to handle the fiddly bits (stairs, furniture, round the back of the fridge etc.). The vast bulk of the work is handled by the two robots. I view these projects in the same way - they're a good starting point and will do a large amount of the work, but you'll still need some skill and manual work at the end to finish things off.
I used to live in the Barbican in London...
I'm working there and posting from there now. You have my deepest sympathies, horrible place. I'm from Sheffield - up there we dynamite places like the Barbican, not slap preservation orders on them.
Cheers,
Ian
If there isn't reinforcement, how does the floor on the second story (first story for the UK project :-)) support itself? Is it arched or something?
How does it stay watertight? Do they just mean it will keep the rain off for long enough to get a real roof installed? Or are they planning on leaving it with a concrete roof?
What keeps the concrete from slumping while it's being sprayed? Does someone have to put up forms ahead of time?
" It may eventually be possible to use specially treated gypsum instead of glass window panes."
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
I always thought the first robot house builders would nail 2x4s. Anyway, tell me this costs less than $50,000 a house and Im sold. -$10,000 would be great.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The biggest problem we have here in the third world, other than education, is housing.
Currently what happens is that -- in the urbunising of people -- most people tend to build with whatever materials they have available leading to shanty-towns all over Africa with people living in shack-like hovels.
If this technology is able to deliver, and deliver cheaply, we might just have one of the technologies needed to bootstrap Africa out of abject poverty.
The other major problem, education, might just be in the hands of the OLPC guys...
Part Time Philosopher, Oft Times Romantic, Full Time Unix Geek
Maybe the house can be built in 24 hours, but how long does it take to build the metal rails for the robots? Are the robots reusable or do we have to add the build time for the robots? How long does it take to program the robots?
The process can probably be optimized by firing the people who work on this project and replacing them by robots.
Let us all welcome our new house building SCV overloads!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Dolls-house size! See Fab@Home or see the New Scientist report.
Andrew Yeomans
I finally feel like I'm living in a post 2000 era!
(I just read the headline, to be honest)
So say we all
It will probably be cheaper to buy new robots that come with cartridges.
Or do Slashdot article titles get more extreme and ridiculous each and every day? I swear I'm going to wake up one day and find the headline "Robot Superchickens developing new nano-technology to fight humans"
- There's no place like 127.0.0.1
http://www.isi.edu/CRAFT/
Much more details.
Why is it that interesting stories like this never carry pictures!
Here are some at least:
http://www.contourcrafting.org/
Well, you could buy the really, really big concrete-refill syringes instead, but you usually get gypsum all over your hands. It's best just to trade them in at a concrete-cartridge recycling centre.
Meta will eat itself
In the UK, there is usually a bloody good reason for the traditional building materials and designs in any area. Mass builders just drop standardised buildings at any angle to the weather which suits them, and then the owners wonder why the walls are always wet, or tiles fall off every time the prevailing wind blows.
The five year gap before it is due to be commercialised in the UK may be due to the development needed to address UK-specific building problems, but it is more likely just to be under funding.
In case you think this is Luddite prejudice, I live in a town where many houses date back to the 17th Century and are built of local materials. Part of the town centre was demolished in the 1970s to build small modern houses. Guess which houses had to be demolished less than 30 years later? New builds this century are already starting to look a bit decrepit as the wind and rain (which are thrown off by our local stone) do their work on cheap modern building materials.
Pining for the fjords
Not to mention it'll take five cartridges to fill the Housejet. Also for some bizzare reason the cheapest material cartridge, the wall cartridge, will cost more than either the window or electrical cartridge.
My first thoughts: Wow! This could revolutionize, like, everything!
Second thoughts: Hang on a sec. Sounds too good to be true.
I'm having visions of street after street, suburb after suburb, of awful robot-built houses right now.
I am not a lawyer but my sister is, so don't mess with me
and $5000 refills which never work?
... but luckily youtube has a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7r-qlKkUo
Dependency hell? =>
Ooooo, orbital structures. It may not be able to make the solar panels, but this might be able to take a lot of the work out of putting together a Solar Power Satellite, and some day even an orbital colony. Or planet-based colony, I suppose, for you land-loving heathens.
The idea is not new....
I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at last of much more revolutionary affairs, of a thing running to and fro along a temporary rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint from a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets.
H.G. Wells, ANTICIPATIONS OF THE REACTION OF MECHANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS UPON HUMAN LIFE AND THOUGHT (1902 second edition)
I can just imagine the business model now... sell the robot for $49.95 and the 'ink' cartridges for $49950 (good for a volume of 5m^3). House plans will be loaded via usb stick, but they can only be designed with licensed software ($100000/user), and only then by architects who have attended the $50000 training course, which must be attended every two years.
Within hours of release someone will have reverse engineered the 'ink' cartridge slot to take generic branded concrete bags, and the private keys for signing the plans will follow a few days later. The manufacturers will release a statement saying that using generic branded 'ink' cartridges will void the warranty and may not give you the quality you want. On closer inspection, the quality statement is possibly true, but only marginally and nobody cares. As for warranty, it is cheaper to go and buy a new unit than to put up with the downtime caused by waiting for a repair.
Long and drawn out legal proceedings will begin, firstly against the hackers who released the original hack for the concrete bags, and then against the hackers who released the signing keys, but it will be ruled that you have to identify and locate the defendant first before you can prosecute them. After a succession of grandmothers and 8 year old girls are brought before the judge as being the original culprits, the case is thrown out, eventually.
Then they'll start bringing charges against the users who are using the 3rd party products, but that never works, and they haven't actually made enough money yet to be able to 'influence' any congressmen to get on their side.
And so on.
Anything you can dream, as long as it is sufficiently ugly, you can build.
The ______ Agenda
This doesn't replace my idea to construct a house made out of giant legos does it? Because I totally want that, about 1000 mostly hollow plastic legos could make a house in an afternoon.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Sweet! Now if I can just imagine some real estate that I could actually afford in San Diego County.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Concrete has been used to build some very attractive housing in the UK - not just horrible blocks. In the "Art Deco" (I think) period of the '20s some architects made excellent use of the material - especially it's ability to form smooth curves. See examples in the "Poirot" TV series, for example.
/. "profit", but I don't see it.
Of course, I don't know how practical they are for everyday living, but I suspect they are no worse than typical modern rabbit-hutches.
The problem will be
find your building plot
get a design made
spend six months getting planning permission
spend another six months modifying to meet building regulations
a month preparing the site
organise the manchinery to arrive
put everything off for a week when the typical British weather opens up
then you can build in a day
somewhere in that sequence there should be the traditional
Andy
It does not take 200 days to build a house. An example of mass production would be 'tract housing'. Such houses go up really fast (but not a day). It might take 200 person days to build a house. So, with weekends off and vacations, we could round that up to a person year. That person year might cost $100,000.
The robot might cost $1,500,000. The interest on that much money is probably $150,000. If the robot builds even two houses per year, it is profitable.
I realize that I have left out a bunch of stuff but you get the general idea. It's the same reason you dig basements with a mechanical digger. Even if labor was free, it would cost more to dig a basement by hand!
"If you ask a bricklayer to lay bricks in anything other than a straight line, you'll run into problems," said Soar. "But if you ask the robot to make a squiggly line it really doesn't care." I'm sure there are many a brickmason who can run bricks in many formations besides a straight line. I'm positive on this fact because the brickmasons who did my foundation was anything but straight.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The machine builds houses in 1/200 of the time at 1/5 of the cost. Who wants to bet the price of houses will stay around the same level? Almost any random 2-bedroom house in the Netherlands costs a quarter of a million euros nowadays. The same size house sells around a hundred thousand in Portugal. In Canada, this price range can get you a 5-bedroom house. Based on these numbers, it would seem to me that the cost of building the house itself is just a minor factor in the price of a house.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
loans are not forbidden in islam. charging interest is. http://www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/economics/nbank1.html so maybe you aren't racist, but you sure are stupid.
Oh great. So are there robotic inspectors or is it the wink wink, nudge nudge. Oh wait, the robots wouldn't take bribes.
They said that it could be built. They didn't mention if the built structure had to still hold together once the scaffold is removed...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well I guess now we know how the southern border wall will be built without mexican labor.
What's a carbon footprint?
from TFA: "The robots will also create a smaller "carbon footprint" than conventional building methods;"
Ni.
In big structures, like highway bridges or airport landing strips, concrete is often pre-stressed. They use steel cables in the bottom part of the concrete and tighten those cables up by threading nuts into the cables ends. This means the concrete is always under compression so it has less tendency to crack from tensile stress.
Plumbing is no problem; they just hook this baby up to the Internets. After all, plumbing is just fancy tubing, and the Internet is a series of tubes...
I've used the new push together plastic plumbing myself to fit a shower - its extremely easy and down right fool proof. As long as these ducts were smooth and gently curved at corvers pushing this piping down it should not be an issue - ditto for electricals (and cat5)
The sensible designer would also future proof their house by having redundant ducting installed at build time for any future need.
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
I'm pretty sure /. has covered this before.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
which are a pretty deadly combination.
hmm.... Sounds like a good idea, with a one big con.
:)
Pros:
- Bathroom - no need to worry about water leaks since there are no cracks between concrete-blocks to any connecting room and to make it even better just spray the walls and floor with some type of water-seal to protect the concrete.
- Noise - No cracks in walls so the house should be quite isolated from external noise.
- Easy to add thermal and noise isolation in the building, just add a foam-spray nossle to the robot and you can have automatic isolation in the build-process. add a layer in every roof/wall and it should be very noise-resistant & have good thermal isolation.
- Fire persistent - If you build every wall in the building in this material fires should not spread easily between rooms the building.
- Easy&cheap to build
Cons:
- Since it's a very static building it will probably not be very resistant even to small changes in ground-movement, but maybe they can fix this with adding some type of rubber-seal between walls in the build-process.
And a question, how do they build the roofs?? Since they don't have anything to lay down the concrete on they need to build that in a separate place and then lift that onto the building and that would still require construction-workers on-site.
Dreaming of when they invent the real replicator as seen in Star-trek
Speaking of optimisim, I don't think OH&S would be impressed if "the sole foreman on site" was the only person on site.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Five years ago, my opinion is that the next revolution in technology would be some sort of home lathe. You could buy or create designs of any 3d object, buy a block of material put it into the home lathe and the object would come out. It would be revolutionary because transport of complicated, fragile objects would be dramatically reduced. Excess material could be returned for recycling (and credit), distribution networks for many objects would be dramatically simplifed.
When I saw this, it was my first thought. I had it wrong - you don't need to lathe anything from a block, you can form it in this way. All that's needed is mass production of the technology and development of newer better liquid setting materials.
Not only can the big version build your house, but your home version can make your bathroom fittings, ready to upholster furniture and many more fixtures and fittings.
GypsumBot Load Letter - Fill Tray with A4...
Nothing witty
More real estate in Antarctica and Greenland, maybe. Less real estate on almost all coasts, worldwide, though. We should try to compensate that by leveling some mountains, build new cities up there.
All the construction workers losing their jobs because of 'dem damn 'bots!' may shift to taking down rocks in order to save humankind from the floods. Until robots take over that business, too, that is.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Sure, it only takes one operator on site to run the thing, but you should see how many bastards it takes to pick it up and shake it when the gypsum cart gets low.
What are these things building on? The article doesn't even mention that as far as I can tell. Are they starting with a flat surface? I assume they're not starting with an undeveloped lot. Are they 'printing' directly on the soil or are they starting on a concrete foundation of some sort? If they're relying on humans to pour the foundations, the robots are going to have to account for human error. Human error happens a lot when pouring a foundation though most often in ways that don't mean much to a human. However, a foundation being off by an inch or two may completely throw off a robot builder.
"If you ask a bricklayer to lay bricks in anything other than a straight line, you'll run into problems,"
Right. Asking anyone who calls themselves something other than a mason to lay bricks for you is just asking for that sort of trouble. My grandfather's old rule for finding a good mason was to ask to hold their torpedo level. A good mason will never let you do that.
All this being said, I really hope this project works out. Even if you still need regular workers to do everything but the frame, you're still saving 4 to 8 workdays and time is money when you're a builder paying interest on your construction loan, assuming the other steps aren't any harder as a result.
Now we no longer need to take huge structures to the european space station or to the moon or mars etc (apart from the robot obviously). Now we can just sent the ink and beam up the print job. No Astronauts ! Less gravity ! We just send the astronaughts to the new moon base when the robot says it's ready. For some strange reason, it puts me in mind of the pods that those clever little wasps build on my shed roof each summer. Mind you, wouldn't it be embarassing to go all that way only to find a mangled mess or a "printer out of paper" error. Also, tell NASA not to forget to press the 'Online' printer button.
This is great news. I can now live out my ambition, inspired by The Sims, of building a house with no doors or windows around a person, putting a camera inside and seeing what happens. Simplt replace the building software with The Sims 3-D, and off we go.
I think, at least, we can be certain that there WILL be stairs in these houses.
-subtraho
Mostly due to low quality social housing of the past. It isn't necessarily the case though, there are pre-fabricators who will design a house to your spec, manufacture it in a factory and build it on site.
e.g.
http://www.maplehomes.com/
http://www.yurtworks.com/
http://www.potton.co.uk/
Deleted
For decades now inventors have come up with metal, wood, and other kinds of "prefab" or "sitefab" homes.
But you don't see many. Like nearly none.
There's a reason for that.
There are litterally millions of people whose jobs depends on houses being built the slow clumsy old way. Every time a new technology pops up, those folks, thru their lobbyists, briefcase and baseball-bat carrying, "convince" state and local building code boards to disallow that kind of construction. They also get unions to block the construction, movement, and erection of these structures. So far it's worked really well.
About the only loophole is how "double wide" mobile homes got snuck past these folks.
3d Printers are an awesome tool for designing... Usually you use them to create models instead of the product. Watching them work is insane. These days they print in color.. Think of the movie 5th element... when the machine sprays the chick together...
Recently i got to work with an architect who designed & built a house in Australia using a industrial laser cutter to produce all the components for the house. This is a very cool looking building that could only be output from a computer. This machine sounds like it can do the same on a mass scale with materials besides wood.. Using hand tools to create this type of architecture is arcane at best. I hope to see some decent product from this technology not just cheap looking pre-fab buildings.
this link is a 3d printer company. Check it out if the technology interests you
Kill your TV
From the article:
"Your shoes, clothes and car are already made automatically, but your house is built by hand and it doesn't make sense." Reeeeeaaaally? Doesn't he know that shoes, for example, have to go through about 300 or so pair of hands while they are being made?
Of course, the kind of work we are talking about quickly turns a human being into a robot, so, I guess, the difference is negligible. Especially considering that the people in question are Chinese or Some-Other-God-Forsaken-Place-ese.
As globalization proceeds, 1st World wages are going to fall as 3rd World wages rise.
The only way the 1st World can take this is by having their cost of living decrease. For many things, like consumer electronics, and soon, automobiles, these costs are already decreasing as they are being manufactured in developing countries.
What 1st World people need now to decrease in cost is housing.
After that, 1st World people can afford 50% cuts in wages so as to remain competitive with the rest of the world.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
With the new developments vastly increasing the ease of reproduction of buildings, and the sudden upsurge in building piracy costing the industry over $10bn per year, it is necessary to implement strong rights management in order to prevent people from illegally producing buildings without paying a license fee to the architectural design firm. To provide fair compensation to the children of architects, new laws are being introduced that require all buildings to be made from approved construction materials that implement the StaysUpForSure protocol, which allows software monitoring and control of every component, in the "Fair House Prices for Children Act".
The "Walls" house operating software (included with every new house purchase) scans all components of the house, several times a second, to check for unauthorised modifications or attempted duplication. It contacts the central licensing servers once a day to ensure that this design of house is licensed for construction at this location, validated against its built-in GPS receiver. If the GPS receiver cannot receive a signal, or the licensing server does not report that the building is approved at the current location, or the component validator detects unauthorised modifications, then the software will signal all the construction materials to shut down, causing the house to collapse and protecting you from the dangers of building piracy.
Building insurance companies welcomed the move, saying: "Before now, when a house fell down, we had to spend money on careful investigations to identify whether the house was constructed from properly licensed blueprints - but now we can be sure that any collapsed house is the result of building piracy, which voids the insurance policy".
This is the most impractical means of constructing concrete walls that I have ever heard of. How much does the contractor who mobilizes, operates, and maintains the equipment charge you for his service? Who would this contractor get bonding and insurance from? No one in their right mind would take so much risk.
This "3D printer" only provides a wall. The finished rooms in the "house" will certainly need paint, and for this paint to look nice, the owner will expect a smooth substrate, requiring furring and drywall over the rough substrate that this "printed" wall will produce. The cost of furring out drywall over a substrate is nearly as much as just constructing a simple stud wall of wither wood or steel, and laminating both sides with drywall. The kitchen and bathrooms will need at least working cabinets and countertops, adding more cost. The house will need acceptable, comfortable floor finishes, adding more cost. The people will want receptacles to plug in their electronic consumer goods, so you will need to accomodate for that adding more cost. The roof must be watertight. Any building MUST rest on a suitable foundation. Does the robot excavate and build footings and foundation walls? I have not mentioned the cost of electrical and plumbing work.
There is much more to a house than some walls.
Any mature architect that is excited about this is taking too many trips to Oompa Loompa Land.
Spending Resources on Defense leaves Less to defend.
Unfortunately, what we really need is far more "less ethnic" contractors. Most of the contractors in our area are "Eastern European" contractors, and they do absolutely nothing to rid themselves of stereotypes. For example, they refuse try to communicate well in English. I find it very interesting that when you talk to them about something that interests them, they communicate flawlessly, but when it comes to points of business, they play the "I no understand Inglish" card. Nice try, you Croatian fuck. (And yes, I know he was Croatian, because he made it a point to point it out.)
Sorry if this comes off as typical WASP bigotry, but facts are facts. I welcome immigrants, but only those who are willing to "become American". You can bring your culture over, but leave your foreign arrogance and rudeness at the border.
"Compared to a conventional house, the speed of construction will be increased 200-fold and the building costs will be reduced to a fifth of what they are today," said Khoshnevis. Hmmm--- a 200-fold increase in speed of contstruction but only a fivefold savings? I don't think the cost of materials is that large compared to labor. Who would be getting the $PROFIT$ here??
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Just imagine the kind of thing that could happen if you could hack your way into the control computer and rearrange the plans...
"What is THAT on the top of the building?!"
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Not only is it old news in the rest of the world, it's old news on Slashdot too!
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
PC LOADWAL?
What the $&%#%@ does that mean?!?!
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
Too bad Dr. Seuss is dead. He would have had a field day with something like this.
Material coast is about a 1/3 to a 1/2. depending on the house.
A log cambin is more then 1/2.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
The cost to build will be slashed enormously, given the elimination of hourly immigrant labor, but somehow, somehow the price to the buyer will be the same as stick-built, or slightly lower. The savings will be passed on to the builder -- always.
I wonder what is going to happen if I print p0rn with a 3D printer...
the Monolithic Dome Institute out of Italy Texas (monolithic.com) has been making concrete domes all over the world by using a concrete sprayer inside a custom baloon. They've built storage silos, warehouses, homes, churches, schools, office buildings, grocery stores, etc. I worked with one Architect who lives in a sprayed dome home, and we built a large church. It went up fast (frame/dome up in a week.) They spray foam insulation on the infalted liner, then anchor rebar to the foam, then spray concrete inside. We did several 50 meter (+-) domes for the church. (seats 2000). That was in 2000. these things have been built since the 1970's. The article just describes a fancier version of the same machines. (The sprayer mounted on a cherry picker inside the dome envelope while it's inflated is a sight.) Wasn't fully automated though. Still needed masons, plumbers, electricians etc. these new versions will too.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
You think OH&S would have problems with this? I bet the unions would have a MUCH bigger problem. I hope the people behind this project don't mind fish or really long naps.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
http://www.isi.edu/craft/CC/Welcome_files/resource s/media/CCmachine.wmv
Looks like the machine is building a large penis
Dean: ROBOT HOUSE!!! Bender: Cheese It!
Also, this doesn't save as much work as you'd think. Putting up framing and basic walls is only maybe 1/3 of the work of building a house. Finishing and making it look livable inside is the real skilled labor...
-b.
Dolores Chumsky's house leaks. There's no way to fix it. "Just try and get someone to come and make repairs," laments the Union, N.J., resident. "They may come in once, but they never come back." That's because Chumsky's innocent-looking suburban residence is a handyman's nightmare. It also stands as a monument to one of the most colossal flops in the history of scientific innovation. It is one of a dozen surviving examples of Thomas Edison's worst invention ever: the single-piece cast-concrete home.
Concrete homes, he said, would revolutionize American life. They would be fireproof, insect-proof, easy to clean. The walls could be pre-tinted in attractive colors and would never need to be repainted. Everything from shingles to bathtubs to picture frames would be cast as a single monolith of concrete, in a process that took just a few hours. Extra stories could be added with a simple adjustment of the molding forms. Best of all, the $1,200-dollar houses would be cheap enough for even the poorest slum-dwellers to afford.
A builder had to buy at least $175,000 in equipment before pouring a single house. Furthermore, nobody wanted to live in a residence that had been dubbed "the salvation of the slum dweller." Although Edison optimistically described an early model as "in the style of Francois I," it was more in the style of an oversized outhouse.Why Dolores Chumsky Hates Thomas Edison
It would seem to be a devastating advance for the immigrant community that does so much of the construction in the US. Similar to the automation of agricultural harvesting?
The initial cost won't kill you. But the replacement cartridges, that's what'll do it.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
PC Load Limestone? What the fuck does that mean!?
It can build anything I can dream? How about Ultima tower for a good start? http://www.tdrinc.com/images/photos/large/Towers04 a1.jpg
After the land, the biggest cost in building a house is the building materials. Labor is a tiny fraction. House building machines have been around for 100 years.
"Anything you can dream you can build" anything i dream is likely to fall over.
Uh-oh. The most accurate description that I ever read of Second Life's building style was "a fifth-grader on shrooms". Can't wait to see this in RL. =8^D
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
These robots aren't trying to address 3rd world housing. As many others have pointed out the robots need more expensive materials than human workers and human workers are cheaper than the robots. These robots are being developed for manned space missions, to construct habitats on the moon and mars. Anything that happens in the 3rd world is a side effect, not a real goal. It's also a liability issue, in case they fall down in tens years and harm someone.
The cost to build will be slashed enormously, given the elimination of hourly immigrant labor, but somehow, somehow the price to the buyer will be the same as stick-built, or slightly lower. The savings will be passed on to the builder -- always.
You are ignoring the enormous R&D expenses that have to be paid for *before* that first home is built. The developers are going to pay quite a bit for those first robots. It's not necessarily that the robot inventor/manufacturer is trying to rip off developers. The inventor/manufacturer may only have 3-5 years before competitors have their own robots, they may need to recoup that R&D quickly.
I thought the Mafia had given up drugs and murders and had gone into music and movie distribution these days? :-)
Today I read two articles about 3D printing, TFA and one about printing micro miniature machine parts.
While the technologies are different, they both convert a digital representation of a 3D object into a physical object by spraying construction material out of a nozzle. From tiny ear bones to four bedroom ramblers.
What an age we live in!
THis sounds more like a stereo lithography machine than an inkjet printer....
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary and those who don't.
Some people think that it's ok to print source code to the concrete prefab building printer. THIS SIMPLY IS NOT SO!!!
..Jeff Keegan
seven syllables explain TiVo: kee gan dot org slash ti vo
The walls might be square, the windows might all be the same size (so I coud buy blinds that fit), I wouldn't have wall outlets on the same circuit with the lights, the basement plumbing for a toilet would be useable because it wouldn't be too close to the wall, I wouldn't have two different circuits feeding one wall outlet, and I could put furniture in the little bedroom (can't get anything larger than a twin bed through the door in the hall).