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Thread: The Whole-House Machine
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10-04-2005, 11:34 PM #1Web Hosting Master
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The Whole-House Machine
http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-0...achine/?page=1
Some scientist from U of Southern California has made a machine that can build structures without human labor... This could revolutionize construction.
Khoshnevis believes his contour crafter will revolutionize building construction, dragging it into the digital age. Today, despite the advent of tech tools like power saws, mechanized cranes, and pneumatic nailers, construction is essentially the same tiring, gritty job it has been for 20,000 years. Workers still have to cut, grasp, hoist, place, and fasten materials, which is why labor accounts for about half of a building’s cost. The process is dangerous, slow, and wasteful: More than 400,000 American construction workers are injured each year, and a typical American house takes at least six months to complete, generating about four tons of waste.
On a cleared and leveled site, workers would lay down two rails a few feet farther apart than the eventual building’s width, and a computer-controlled contour crafter would take over from there. A gantry-type crane with a hanging nozzle and a components-placing arm would travel along the rails. The nozzle would spit out concrete in layers to create hollow walls and then fill in the walls with additional concrete, most likely an insulating variety that incorporates polystyrene beads. The placement arm would insert wiring, reinforcing rods, and plumbing and ventilation shafts in hollow chases left in the walls, welding and screwing sections together as the building rises. The arm would then place beams on top of the completed walls to form floors and the roof. Humans would hang doors and insert windows.
Khoshnevis is inspired by the technology’s potential to build dignified low-income housing. “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.
Even NASA seems to be interested. Khoshnevis recently shipped a prototype wall builder to engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They want to find out if contour-crafting technology could erect buildings on the moon from lunar dust.
Khoshnevis will use a larger, more advanced version of the device later this year to erect the first robotically constructed house in just one day.
We could use this to build emergency shelters extremely quickly in events such as hurricanes.--
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10-04-2005, 11:48 PM #2Web Hosting Master
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We could use this to quash the construction industry - or at least tradespeople that work in the industry.
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10-05-2005, 12:10 AM #3Retired Moderator
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We could use this to quash the construction industry - or at least tradespeople that work in the industry.
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10-05-2005, 12:13 AM #4Junior Guru
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The world is changing. Unfortunately, people will need to let their jobs go to make way for technology. Please go peacefully construction workers. Please.
Cody Watson
Business Student @ SFU [Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Management & Technology, Co-op Certificate, Honours]
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10-05-2005, 12:36 AM #5Temporarily Suspended
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wow.. that is pretty cool actually!