Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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
"No Sir, it's not a printing error, it's an architectural feature."
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
... 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
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
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
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
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.
It will probably be cheaper to buy new robots that come with cartridges.
http://www.isi.edu/CRAFT/
Much more details.
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
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
... 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.
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.
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
"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
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 ]
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 ";_
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
Concrete without rebar isn't concrete.
No.
Concrete without rebar is still concrete. It just isn't reinforced concrete.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Concrete with re-bar is reinforced concrete. Re-bar is not only put in to resist tensile forces due to bending. Re-bar is put in to prevent the concrete cracking. That said there are systems (developed for spayed concrete in tunnels) that incorporate steel of syntheic fibres which have a similar effect to re-bar but are just mixed into the concrete.
Given other comments in this discussion is is probably worth noting that brick walls have no tensile strength, unreinforced concrete is better. As long as this approach is only used for vertical walls there is no need to reinforce (except to rpevent cracking as mentioned above).
Art is the mathematics of emotion
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".
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
hmm, in a normal printer, I'd use a small needle. In this case, I'd use a small explosive.
The firm of polish builders I employed to replace my (polystyrene tile-covered) kitchen ceiling and move a door in one of my walls last year seemed competent, had a foreman who spoke perfect english, stuck to the original quote they gave despite discovering a few problems in the process, and generally did a good job.
We're talking about the building trade. You get your fair share of cowboys, regardless of the nationality of said cowboy. Don't read anything into it.