A Printer That Can Print a 2,500 Square Foot House in 20 Hours
industrytap.com
industrytap.com
The problem is the usual: a single material isn't enough to make anything but the simple constructs. Almost everything is complex these days. Materials Science hasn't been a science for a century for nothing.
Even imagine the robot exists: how exactly does it just 'plug in' the plumbinb and electrical systems? Currently it takes a person to scramble all over the house, drilling and fitting and connecting.
There is nothing being solved here. Just a blue-sky story about an imaginary printer.
Could you watch the video? He already addresses these issues, and they are clearly researching how to do this. This is just a giant pick-and-place machine working with larger components. They already show that some human effort will be required in the assembly process, but hopefully will be much safer than what is done today.
The real breakthroughs will come when people stop fixating on "printing" (extrusion) and realize it's the 3-d (4-d, 5-d, etc.) gantry that's the super-useful part. Fitted with different tools, such as painting, gluing and sanding tools, a 3-d gantry can be extremely useful.
There will however continue to be a "last mile" problem in Computer-Assisted Manufacturing (CAM) applications. These are the details, such as stripping wires, screwing in electrical boxes, etc. where the robot to perform these tasks is prohibitively expensive. The breakthrough is the 3-d gantry form, due largely to the reduction in prices of microcontrollers and power transistors, but it does not extend to all robotics, such as detail work.
For example, I've been watching videos on building guitars. I would love to see a 3-d printer friend explain to me how it's going to build a guitar from scratch. The economy of 3-d printing doesn't extend to the large number of distinct tasks, requiring different tools, techniques, process and forces in most objects that are useful in the real world.
This entropic mixture of difficult processes, I would argue, is the very reason WHY particular artifacts, such as a guitar, television set, couch, etc. are valuable in the first place. It is because no quantity of single, unskilled process (like shoveling coal) can produce them.
I don't make guitars but I am guessing you could 3-d print most of a factory to make guitars. All the jigs and fixtures ready for use accurate to a 1/1000th.
What I do know about, and am interested in, is 3-d printing foundry patterns. Its harder to make a foundry pattern than you'd think, not just the obvious stuff like bulk material shrinkage and draft angles, but its really hard to handle differential shrinkage (warping, essentially). Its a complicated fine woodworking skill (assuming you're using wood foundry patterns). So you can't 3-d print a cast iron pan or an engine block, but you can print a pattern to be rammed in a sand mold and then cast some iron in the mold and ta-da a perfectly flat pan or perfectly straight engine block or whatever. This isn't a magic tool that'll make any idiot able to do foundry work, but it does mean that any idiot on the planet would be able to share world class pattern designs.
I would be happy to be able to print some holding fixtures for my metal lathe. You can't make crazy deep hogging cuts with flimsy PLA holding the work to the mill table, but you could do "something" at least.
I think people who expect 3-d printers to be magic star trek replicators are going to be very disappointed, although indirectly via one or two levels of indirection they will probably play a huge role in everything, soon enough.
Its just positive machining. Much as people don't use my negative machining traditional lathe and mill, I don't think joe 6 pack is going to be using a 3d printer on a regular basis, although much like negative machining revolutionized the world behind the scenes, sorta, positive machining will also revolutionize the world, again, behind the scenes sorta.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-worlds-first-3d-printed-guitar
edit - and a video of a 3d printed violin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU3AZmf6O7I
I think that 3D printing will win when it starts making things that couldn't be made before. How about an instrument with complex echo chambers impossible to reproduce with wood and glue?
Lays them in as it builds presumably. Pick and place is easy with a big h-crane robot.
EDIT: They also show visual demonstrations of techniques as to HOW this would be accomplished.
It may be true that fixtures could be set into place in an automated way. Its not true that they can be connected. And certainly no existing fixture is ready to be installed this way.
Housing construction depends upon massive efficiencies of scale. All the new fixtures for these imaginary houses would be designed differently (for robotic installation, not hand-installation). They will start out at a price many multiples of existing fixtures. They will go down ONLY if this process becomes very, very common.
So, maybe this could be used to make novelty houses for the rich. That's about it. The video makes grand claims about cheap housing for the masses. That is preposterous. Folks in India are not suffering from expensive housing because construction is a dangerous occupation. Its land and materials that are expensive. Labor is the cheapest part of their equation I think.
I think they may be aiming for something like Katrina homes. Or any other refugee situation. See some more refugees crossing the border, squirt a few extra refugee houses where they fit. Prefab is probably still cheaper.
Also, you can lay down multiple materials by making the head swappable. I would also say plumbing and electrics are nowhere near as complex as they used to be. Everything is available as clip-on fittings these days, which is perfect for automation.
But your point still stands. A master plumber might not be required for every part of every job today.
I do tech/IT by day, but have a welding certification as well. Its extremely easy to braize copper tubing together for plumbing once you've practiced, but feels like its work that isn't necessary when there are easier ways to do it (ie the pex pipe you suggested).
Coincidently, I'm replacing two toilets in my home tonight. Wish me luck!
Off topic: They actually advertise the toilet as being unclogable and demonstrate it by flushing a bucket of golf balls down it. Brilliant.
Why do you think one or more significantly smaller printers couldn't be used as an on-site prefab factory? That seems like a much more reasonable way to approach this problem.
Also as others point out this is just the frame (and if you do the robotic crane thing you can add a roof. You might also be able to use your robotic crane to do joists for overhangs but the finish suffers as your joist material is exposed on the underside.
No doubt solvable problems but they take away from some of the 'magicalness' of fused deposition printing. Stereo lithography where the part is neutrally bouyant in the construction fluid doesn't have those issues but it has other issues associated with strength and material choices that can be laser activated.
For now doing a concrete lay-up would be pretty killer but building the forms on site isn't that hard and in both cases you need to transport the concrete at the last minute.
Bottom line I think the stuff that BluHomes [1] is doing is much more creative than trying to do this with 3D printing.
"The event featured talks on crystal therapy and Egyptian psychoaromatherapy and, according to the schedule, closed with the chanting of mantras and songs for Gaia."
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/10/3751786/ted-pseudoscience...
Is easily solvable though by having the robot drop a plank across the gap before printing the lintel, so I don't think that is a showstopper.
My point is not that the problems are not addressable, they are, rather its that "3D Printing" and "Homes" isn't a good fit yet given what we know. This neither invalidates 3D printing as a pretty revolutionary way to manufacture, nor the notion that there might be better ways to build homes, just that this particular thought experiment is a pre-mature at best, and potentially forever impractical.
Along the same lines I have been sketching designs for a robot to lay down 2-part foam, wire mesh and shotcrete, though I have been trying to work out if I can get it to climb its own wall, rather than needing a giant crane.
If you notice guy obviously competent and expeirienced in the field presenting something stupid it's more likely than not that you are missing piece of knowlege that is required for understaning why it actually isn't stupid.
Just watch the movie. It shows how to deal with doors and windows.
The problem is that pre-fabricated or pre-manufactured homes are a very specific category of homes and require specific disclosures when selling and financing. It's basically a derogatory term used to describe cheaply built structures that are a step above mobile homes.
Home being one of the most valuable assets a typical family holds. In SoCal and many other places, land makes up the bulk of the value. Place a structure on that land that then detracts from the value doesn't seem very prudent. Not to mention difficult to finance, as banks do not look favorably on that class of building.
So, unfortunately, innovation has to deal with current market and regulatory frameworks. 3D printing as proposed (though my not be valuable), would probably fall under the "custom house" label, which is the most valuable classification. Even if it's just a tract home, it's still a lot better than being considered pre-fab/pre-manufactured.
The above definition lumps them together and unfortunately if there isn't something that makes the home not fall under that definition, you are going to have to disclose this at sale and financing will be a PITA...
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/episode-gui...
> Revisit: Walton, 2008
> Kevin revisits David and Greta Iredale, who replaced their original house which they designed and built themselves with a German built, precision engineered Huf Haus.
> Esher, 2004
> Kevin McCloud follows a couple who have built houses before, but never on this scale. Their new 'Huf Haus' is designed and made in Germany but delivered for assembly in Surrey.
The thing that intrigues me about fiberous ceramics for deposition printing is that no printers currently take advantage of the (albeit tiny) tensile strength of the deposited filament.
For plastic printing, this isn't very useful, but potentially for this new construction compound you could effectively (or nearly so) bridge gaps with little droop or sag.
I do think from an engineering perspective that placing blanks underneath is the best bet, but on the order of a 20-hr print, I don't think its unreasonable to have someone walking around with the machine placing single layer "blanks" at each opening at each level.
This arm has an attachment for a polyurethane foam sprayer, a milling device, and a paint sprayer. In which case they can spray out a concrete form, mill it to get more precise (urethane foam is a bit imprecise), and paint it.
Then they want to get a series of these trucks to work together in a "hive" format... crazy kids.
The crazy bit is sending that hive to Mars to build accommodation units for settlers.
Concrete printing is not new so I wonder what is keeping them from building the printer over a year later.
Some speculation: maybe it's very hard to print concrete out in the open with all kinds of weather messing up the print. Or companies just don't believe in the benefits so investors are hard to find.
Another thing too. How does one recover if the printer screws up or worse yet the program loaded is the wrong one or somehow corrupted? That could generate a whole house's worth of concrete waste.
Interesting if true. I had no idea.
Even for just houses: consider framing, or doing roof work--walking around on joists is not really safe.
http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/industry/index.htm
There are not so many people mining, and there are ridiculously strict regulations around mining. (I used to build, inspect, test 'chock interface units' which can be thought of as 'active walking pit props'. A cutting head removes a long stretch of coal, which falls onto a conveyor. That new section needs to be pit-propped, so this first line walks forward with the cutting head.)
Farming has many accidents - busy people, lots of opportunity for accident. Also a high rate of suicide. (Again, access to means and methods. Farmers are one of the small number of people allowed to own guns in the UK.)
It would be interesting to see the number of deaths per 1,000 workers for each sector, to try and get a better comparison.
The 3D printed houses will be a life-saver on Moon and Mars though.
That said, can we at least be honest that having that much capital locked up in stupid consumer and enterprise gambles is actually a pretty obviously sub-optimal use of that money for the common good?
I just would appreciate some acknowledgement that, "Yeah, we don't fund things like this that could help the average person because it doesn't give us money."
It's the same thing behind making money off of war, off of cancer, or off of scarcity in general--I don't ask that you admit that you're evil (if that exists in your belief system), but merely that you are profiting off of human misery and suffering.
Perhaps most importantly, because the war on cancer has sidetracked the development of utilitarian things like anti-biotics, of which we are about to run out (depending on what you read, we've already run out).
The folks that manufacture Lexus SUVs have saved and improved the lives of quite a few people, but one does wonder just how much good that has done everyone else who can't afford it.
Can't you see that these miracles may as well not exist for many families, or that by pursuing them at all costs they set themselves up for poverty?
I don't deny your experience, but I don't think you should assume it is automatically applicable to anyone else.
Yes, some of these treatments are really expensive. You have to also realize that these treatments are really expensive to develop. Why should I expect incredibly smart and highly specialized people to give away their time for free? It takes huge amounts of resources to solve a problem like cancer.
I promise you I understand the problems caused by the cost of healthcare as much as or more than most people. That being said, the option to be poor and alive is still much better than being dead. You can always come back from being poor.
A guy can get up on stage and promise to save the world pretty easily. Investors, however, have to live in the real world where they actually have to manifest the promised tech. If they don't think they can, well, odds are they are correct.
Incidentally, cancer researchers aren't profiting off of human misery... they're profiting off of reducing human misery. Is there a better thing to profit off of? The ones you have to watch out for are the ones who wish to extend your misery for their own gains, but that's not required for profit, and in fact is often against their own long-term interests anyhow.
Meanwhile, trivial enterprise and consumer products may not be going to uplift a country any time soon, but they can be recursed upon, and the technologies involved in those industries - which have a wide range of potential applications, including some charitable potential - continue to advance.
It doesn't make any sense to build a system based on what you would like people to be rather than what they are. And for better or worse people's relatively direct purchasing of utilions for others tends to be both fairly rare and inefficient.
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I'd be interested to hear how you think CAM and computing technology would have evolved without funding for 'stupid consumer gambles,' and the need to compete with other manufacturers in that regard.
I think that that rather neatly undermines your point.
It wasn't the VCs spending lots of money. The big desktop revolution (outside of Apple) was initially driven by IBM, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari...all relatively established businesses partnering with younger firms for software or whatnot.
Sure, we had Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but at the end of the day it seems like they're all gone and blown away while the more lasting impacts remain attributed to academia (.edu and .gov again), defense (.mil), or consumer software not really driven by venture capital.
The entire economy is based on the market determining the efficient allocation of capital. This is not an absolute truth, but an approximation based on hundreds of years of theoretical and empirical work. In the absence of significant market frictions that would drive capital away from the AEC industry (and low profits are not a market friction) there is no reason to think that the current allocation of capital is inefficient.
Where I see additional advantages is complicated buildings, for example pig stables where you want hundreds of bays, and maybe special channels for herding pigs etc.
Also for larger settlements once the robot is on-site it can just keep on going while the logistics train is a lot simpler than if they had to coordinate all the different types of parts.
Biggest point he makes is around the danger. It's also why autonomous cars might take off incredibly quick. Once the lawsuits start rolling in by people hurt/killed by people driving cars large companies will have to go autonomous pretty quick.
Is there really a shortage of single family homes anywhere? Maybe in some sort of disaster area or 3rd world, but I imagine there are better/easier/cheaper alternatives for those situations.