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.'"

Uh...

[cptgrudge (177113)]

"Anything you can dream you can build."

That seems overly optimistic. I think there are a few laws of physics that would disagree.

Re:Uh...

[Bloke down the pub (861787)]

I asked them for an estimate to build this [camosun.bc.ca], I'm still waiting for them to get back to me.

Inkjet Plumbing?

[mrshowtime (562809)]

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.

Re:

[jacksonj04 (800021)]

Doubtful, but it would be fairly simple (from what I can gather) to have the 'printer' work in tandem with another device which can accurately place pre-manufactured plumbing, wiring etc.

Of course how that device works is another issue, but you could end up with a single mobile 'rig' which can just move along an empty row of plots and build houses all day. Quicker and cheaper than a load of builders.

Re:Inkjet Plumbing?

[TapeCutter (624760)]

In Japan you can by a house one room at a time, the rooms are placed on a large box metal base. There whole thing is built in a factory and fits together like lego on site, there are no traditional foundations, the base just sits ontop of the ground making the houses "earthquake proof". If you want an extra room you can just bolt one on.

Re:Inkjet Plumbing?

[K8Fan (37875)]

Doubtful, but it would be fairly simple (from what I can gather) to have the 'printer' work in tandem with another device which can accurately place pre-manufactured plumbing, wiring etc.

True. The building trades are moving towards technologies that can be automated. For instance, plumbing is using a plastic semi-rigid tubing called PEX. It's sold in sticks, but is flexible enough to be delivered on large reels. It's crimped onto brass connectors - nothing that couldn't be done by a robot. A regular plumber would do the finish work of connecting the toilets, sinks, baths, water heaters, etc.

Same thing for electrical work. Most houses are wired with Romex, and 3M introduced a crimp Romex joint that could easily be applied by a robot. The robot could ink-jet print all the information about where the wire stubs coming out of the walls come from or go to. The electrician would then just finish the house by connecting the breaker panel, switches, outlets and lights.

There is virtually nothing running through the walls of a house - telephone, TV, alarm, heating and return air ducts, drains - that couldn't be installed with robotic labor.

The problem is that all these cost saving measures are going to eliminate a huge number of jobs. Read Marshall Brain's "Robotic Nation" essay [marshallbrain.com] to get an idea of the social ramifications.

Test page?

[ZeroTrace (594778)]

What happens if you print a test page? Does it build a giant HP logo?

Re:Test page?

[fbjon (692006)]

I have "PC LOAD LETTER" embedded in my floor for some reason.

Super old

[Atario (673917)]

119. Need a Home in a Hurry? Press Print [popsci.com]
Jun 29, 2004
An oversize printer could speed up building construction.

Re:Super old

[Joebert (946227)]

Good to see they've been working on this for awhile, for a moment I thought we'd been stealing technology from the aliens again.

A bit short on links...

[mindriot (96208)]

A few links could of course have helped this article... I think contourcrafting.org [contourcrafting.org] seems to be more or less the right page for the California project. The videos and animations [isi.edu] are quite worth seeing.

For the Loughborough one, the closest I could come up with was Dr Soar's website [lboro.ac.uk]...

Who puts in the rebar?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm) (193358)]

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?

Brilliant news for the 3rd World

[eugene_roux (76055)]

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...

Homepage of the project

[OeLeWaPpErKe (412765)]

http://www.isi.edu/CRAFT/ [isi.edu]

Much more details.

Video's slashdotted

[sucker_muts (776572)]

... but luckily youtube has a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7r-qlKkUo [youtube.com]

I don't think so.....

[Capt James McCarthy (860294)]

"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.

What will this do to housing prices?

[mrjb (547783)]

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.

Welcome to the information age

[asuffield (111848)]

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".

Re:first post

[Walt Dismal (534799)]

As soon as HP hears about this, we'll have $15,000 Housejet cartridges.

Don't buy new cartridges

[Spazoo (1051394)]

It will probably be cheaper to buy new robots that come with cartridges.

Re:Bugs?

[jacksonj04 (800021)]

"No Sir, it's not a printing error, it's an architectural feature."

Re:Bugs?

[heroofhyr (777687)]

What happens when the "ink" clogs?

The robot contractor tells the worker robots to go on their lunch break and then he disappears for six months and doesn't return your calls.

Need to start somewhere

[mccalli (323026)]

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

Re:A truly horrible idea

[Ihlosi (895663)]

Concrete is good for tropical and warm climates where rainfall is not too high, but in the UK where humidity is high most of the year it is a recipe for damp and mould.

Actually, the recipe for mold is insufficient insulation and improper heating/ventilation habits.

None of these have particularly much to do with concrete, other than concrete requiring a few more cm of insulation on the outside than bricks.

Re:Too good to be true?

[vhogemann (797994)]

I think its quite the opposite,

Intricate details, decorations, and such will be much easier, and cheaper, to do using these robotic constructors.

It would be easy to get the finished plans, and add every bit of baroque extravagance to your house using a CAD program, and being able to preview it real-time. Everybody will have a chance to be a Gaudí [wikipedia.org].