Mass Producing Buildings By Robot

The house-building robot has built itself a much firmer foundation in the business world than when Al Fin first covered the topic of robot-built homes. The University of Southern California engineer who developed the ingenious device is ready to spin off a company to begin building the quick and economical homes.

Behrokh Khoshnevis is the brainchild behind this building machine after looking into methods of rapid construction as a way to reconstruct areas devestated by natural disasters such as earthquakes which have plagued his native Iran.

Not only a labour saver of note but the machine is environmentally sound too as reports claim up to seven tonnes of waste are produced by convential house building and the machine would also negate the need for heavy vehicle usage too.

Khoshnevis has also had interest from NASA in his machine as a potential builder of a lunar habitat. _ElectricPig_via_GizmoWatch_via_ImpactLab

Robots to build lunar habitats? Good idea. Using this type of robot to build a lunar base is not as imaginative as bombarding the lunar surface with self-assembling, self-reproducing base-building nano-bots, but if it can be made to work in the lunar environment, why not?

This machine resembles a rapid prototyping machine, using concrete as the material. For now, presumably, it constructs just the building's shell. But quickly putting up a structurally sound building shell provides a save and dry environment for finishing construction inside the building. Later, ways of robotic construction of all layers of the building structure, including plumbing, electrical and communications wiring, heating/AC/ventilation ducting, etc. should be built into such devices.