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Robotics Hardware

The House Building Machine 357

Posted by Zonk from the free-samples? dept.
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?"
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The House Building Machine More

The House Building Machine

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  • That's amazing! It makes me feel naight beeg doow wop wohah!

  • USC (Score:2, Funny)

    by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) *
    is currently building solid walls inside University of Southern California.

    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.

    • Re:USC (Score:2, Interesting)

      by plankers ( 27660 )
      Too funny? I'm not sure how much more insulting you could get. It isn't like all poor people are violent. Maybe they're just that way to you (and I really don't wonder why). Go back to your gated community.

      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.

      • Re:USC (Score:3, Interesting)

        by DarkHelmet ( 120004 ) *

        Haha! I'm laughing at the fact that people would think that way at all and live in gated communities period.

        Having attended SC, it's a little surreal, and a little too elitist for my taste.

        Nice misinterpretation though.

      • Re:USC (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AHumbleOpinion ( 546848 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @03:54AM (#12191900) Homepage
        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.

  • First steps to a Von Neumann Engine (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:25AM (#12191540)
    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.
    • With the proper use of AI (sim-city type + GA and/or Neural nets for aesthic testing), architecture and city-planning libraries and simulations, it should be possible to automate the construction of entire cities (even finding aesthic placements near natural resources).

      One could imagine sending these things out to distant worlds far in advance of our arrival.

      When we arrive to our new utopia, we can just add a reactor or two, turn the lights on and move in, en mass.
    • Completely misguided. Why would we need exponential growth? It's a remnant of our animal (human) past, when we have advanced technologies, we will be already changing ourselves to get rid of such base instincts. It doesn't make sense to exponentially expand, because... why?

      We will certainly use Von Neumann probes, but not to create millions of new Earth, ready to be populated with trillions of human colonists. That would be just pointless.
    • Slashdotter n.: a person who sincerely believes that a robot that can produce blocks of amorphous material is a "first step" towards a self-replicating machine, or that building an elevator to climb an average-size building on a campus is a "first step" towards a space elevator.

      Thomas-

  • Neight feet tall! (Score:4, Funny)

    by thegoofeedude ( 771803 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:25AM (#12191542) Homepage
    Man, Neight feet tall, that's humongous! Almost ine feet!

  • one-piece houses (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fr1kk ( 810571 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:25AM (#12191543) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:one-piece houses (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It should be illegal.

      What? Rust?

      Who are you to subvert the laws of physics (and chemistry)?

      CSR 10 Chapter 3 section 4 states in part "The entropy of the Universe will always increase unless time is reversed. Unauthorized time reversal is a class B felony. Failure to allow entropy to increase in a home/residence is a class C felony."

    • Re:one-piece houses (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @04:10AM (#12191937) Homepage
      So, you instead use aluminium. Easy solution there ;) A bit expensive back then, but no rust problems.

      The problem with "factory built" homes, at least old-style, is that they were all the same model, and tended to be a bit... antiseptic. I like the methods I read about for using the methods used in shipbuilding - automatic fabrication of custom components by machines - to build custom houses out of conventional materials (or metal frame with conventional exteriors) as components that can simply be hooked together on-site.
      • 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 [alpineequip.com]). 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 impre
    • Can we ask where that is?

      I've seen stories on these steel houses but can't find out where they were!
      • Hazleton, Pennsylvania??

        Aren't one of these houses protected? And didn't F.L.Wright design one of these homes?

        I swear I saw this whole thing on tv before.

    • Re:one-piece houses (Score:4, Funny)

      by pegr ( 46683 ) * on Sunday April 10, 2005 @10:50AM (#12193183) Homepage Journal
      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.

      Excellent! Now I don't have to worry about the security configuration of my wireless gear!

  • yawn (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:25AM (#12191544)
    Wake me up when we've got robots who can stand in line for us at the unemployment agency.

  • In Japan... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • thelastguardian asks: Who said moondust is useless?

    I don't know about useless, but these crazy people [slashdot.org] seem to think lunar dust is a dangerous, pressing concern!

  • This is new? (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 )
    I remember reading about similar processes 20-30 yrs ago in PopSci. OK, maybe not the completely robotic part, but run by one guy.

    If you want a bare concrete wall 'house', fine. What about elec, water, sewage, cable lines? Fixtures? Foundation? There is much more to a house than 4 bare concrete walls.

    • Re:This is new? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by maxzilla ( 786061 )
      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.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:49AM (#12191660)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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 !!

  • Countour Crafting ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foobsr ( 693224 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:34AM (#12191589) Homepage Journal
    ... with animations ... [usc.edu] (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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Not to be pedantic... (Score:5, Funny)

    by dcclark ( 846336 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:37AM (#12191598) Homepage
    ... 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.

  • Typical Scientist (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fsh ( 751959 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:44AM (#12191635)
    So what we really have is a robot that can excrete layers of concrete, making a single wall.

    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.

    • Re:Typical Scientist (Score:2, Informative)

      by svoid ( 154185 )
      Actually, if you watch the videos, he does have some trivial ideas for dealing with electrical, plumbing and reinforcement.

      http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev/RP/CC/Utilities.w mv [usc.edu]
    • the frame for a house is the easy part - it goes up in a day or two for even the largest houses.

      Concrete/brick walls, or wooden? I can imagine concrete or brick taking a lot longer than wooden walls.

      • Re:Typical Scientist (Score:4, Informative)

        by RipTides9x ( 804495 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @08:33AM (#12192636) Journal
        A simple concrete poured house (single-story on pre-poured slab), or poured wall foundations can be done in a weeks time easy. The most time consuming part is laying the forms, and having all outside wall pipes, conduit, etc. in place before the pouring. The actual pouring takes about a day. takes 48-72 hours to set depending on weather, and will take a lifetime to cure. Insides are still stick framed, and roofing are engineered trusses.

        Brick walls?? A brick house these days is just brick siding covering up the stick frame. Theres actually an airgap in between the bricks and framing, the bricks don't even help in the support of the house, and the house doesn't help in the support of the bricks. Brick siding can take up to a week to complete and is usually close to one of the last things done on a home during the finish phase. BTW in hurricane areas, there are usually reinforcing straps worked into the brick walls for obivious reasons.

        A stick frame house, or wooden as you call it, can go from a slab/already set basement to finish rough in about a week or less. The point the grandparent poster was trying to make, and that you missed, is that "the roughing in period" when the frame of a structure goes up is usually the quickest part of the build. The final phase of the building or finishing out part is the MOST time consuming part of the build, period.

    • While the article does state that they plan to have the device lay pipes, wires and ducts as well as cement walls it is my experience that these are not where the cost of construction lies.

      I'm currently nine months through an 11 month project to build a house and frankly the time spent raising walls and laying pipes has been small in comparison to the laying of the foundations and the huge number of "finishing" jobs. Without these the output of these robots may be functional but is doomed to look rather i
    • As with any invention, the proof is in the pudding. When someone makes an entire modern house using 100% robotic labor we will start to see a revolution, until then, it's just hot air.
  • Lazy construction workers are going to have to actually *GLUP* work



    I can say this becuase I used to be one.

  • This solution will not be feasible... (Score:4, Informative)

    by HungWeiLo ( 250320 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:49AM (#12191657)
    ...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 other versions of this invention around (Score:3, Informative)

    by Profound ( 50789 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:53AM (#12191677) Homepage
    The TV show The New Inventors featured a wall building robot last month:

    http://www.abc.net.au/newinventors/txt/s1300261. ht m

  • Zonked? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:53AM (#12191681)
    Gets omes leepZ onk!
  • This is definately cool, and innovative, but they make a really dumb point in the article. (More than 400,000 American construction workers are injured each year) Would it be better for those workers to be out of work, than to sustain injuries a couple of times in their lifetime? This is great for building housing where no workers could do the job, but not for normal home building.

    I built a cedar shed in my backyard today. I could have purchased a pre-made one for the same price, but I had a great tim

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @03:00AM (#12191721)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • 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.

        • Re:Lame Point in Article (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          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 t

  • "A billion people today do not have adequate shelter," he says. Using soil dug from the building site and stabilized with cement, the contour crafter could erect inexpensive dwellings customized to a family's needs.
    Oh yeah, it's obvious that a robotic house builder is the only solution for all those poor people living in tents. Can it make coffee from cow dung?
  • With thousands of bloggers injured each year, and a typical news post taking many minutes to edit, review, dupe check, spell check, grammer check and post, blogging has been the same tiring, gritty job for the last few years. For this problem, Commander Taco has a solution: Slashbot2000 A Robotic Slashdot Editor. An eight foot tall by 6 f oot wide prototype post editing machine. With a built-in coffee and espresso maker, hot pocket toaster and ceramic commode, "It's just the thing we hard working editors at

  • What about the finishing? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by csirac ( 574795 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:58AM (#12191714)
    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...
    • Having worked construction myself, a few years ago the "on time" schedule for a house was 90 days. These were LARGE houses, 3k-5k sq ft. And the super is always trying to finish quicker, and schedules have gone down, but I don't know what they are now. As other posters noted, this only does a rough equivalent to a frame (how's it do windows?) and that usually takes a small fraction of the time (10-20%). One job I was on had a crew (4 guys) that framed up 21 houses in 6 weeks. It was amazing.

      So, yeah 6mo is
      • This can be considered a 'good thing' (tm).

        400 000 injured is an emotive argument and something that should lead to prosecutions of companies for neglecting safety regulations (assuming those regulations exist) but throwing millions out of work is not the answer.
  • Firstly how about rather than wasting lots of time building fancy robots to do the job, introducing proper health and safety regulations and *ENFORCING* them?

    Secondly you are never going to eliminate injuries completely. Even in an office environment you get injuries; paper can cut quite badly. Therefore the figure of 400,000 injured workers is meaningless, as there is no indication of the seriousness of the injuries, and neither is there any indication of the number of people working in the industry.
  • 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*
  • Great..now we're going to start getting sued by the ADAA (Architects and Drafting Association of America) for sharing house blueprints...

    Seriously though, the reason its so important for us to sort out this whole filesharing mess now is not because of music or movies, but because the day when 3d fabricators because cheap enough to be the 2nd home printer is fast approaching. When you can fabricate anything, and all you need is a file from a filesharing network, what will happen to the economy?

  • ...neight feet tall and six feet wide...

    This thing is a whole NEIGHT feet tall?!?!! Damn, I didn't even know there was such a big number. Well heck, I often can't remember what comes after three in countin'. But neight feet tall... That must be pretty big!

  • Patent use of concrete extruder to make schools, use of concrete extruder to make offices. Patent making window holes using concrete extruder. Patent concrete extruder with stone chipping attachment. Patent concrete extruder with sharp corner making attachment. Patent concrete extruder with hole proder for making lighter walls.

    Better still, wait a couple of years, patent making houses with a concrete extruder, attach it to your abandoned (really failed) earlier patent applications, wait ten years till nobo
  • Nobody says moondust is useless. It's one of the reasons to GO to the moon. First off, regolith is excellent radiation shielding; every lunar habitation plan from early sci-fi on includes burying the habitat.
    Next, it has oxygen that can be liberated. Also, it's very rich in minerals. There are plans that have been worked up for years that take regolith and energy (from solar arrays or nuclear) and put high-grade iron, nickel and other elements out the other side, using some chemicals that are recovered
    • None of those reasons are reasons to go to the moon in the first place - sure, once you are there moon dust has many uses, but why go there in the first place?

      One possible reason is the vast amounts of He (3), a rare isotope of Helium that is produced by the sun and collects on the moon in the regolith. He (3) is potentially a huge source of fusion energy, far safer, cheaper or easier than Deuterium or Tritium.

      Until we work out how to do it though, I'm putting my money on solar power :)
  • There was an article in the February 2005 issue of Popular Science. The article was about Inkjet technology being used in new ways. For example, a 3d printer to prototype new products, and this house "printer". The house printer is buried on the third page if you are only interested in that part of the article [popsci.com]
  • So, we need:

    A robot to grade the site - level the dirt off.
    A robot to dig the foundation.
    A robot to do the walls (in progress).
    A robot to do the interior finish work.
    A robot to do the exterior finish work.

    And a really ANNOYING robot to run around with a megaphone yelling at all the other robots "Four Hours! We only have FOUR HOURS until the family gets back!" and "Mr. Robotic Bus Driver - MOVE THAT BUS!"

    --

    Seriously, give the amount of pre-fabrication that can be done on a conventional house now (wall se

  • house "kit" via US mail (Score:3, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @12:16PM (#12193754)
    In the early 1900's the Sears Catalog used to sell [oldhouseweb.com] build-it-yourself houses for around $2000. A lot of them are still inhabited.

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