Robot to build home in 1 day at 1/2 the cost to be tried later this year.

The article is in this month's Discover magazine so I can't link it, but I googled and found a good link that covers it. (Needs adobe)http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~khoshnev/RP/CC/NYT.pdf

The robot will be able to build a home from concrete, complete with wiring and plumbing, but you will still have to hang the doors, windows, cabinets, commode, etc. It will give the house any look and color that you want, and even ink-jet in the wallpaper. The home will be stronger, can have curved walls if you want it, will be very fire resistant since wood will not be used in construction, will be stronger against storms and earthquakes.

A prototype can now build walls, and the inventor, Dr. Khoshnev, plans to test a full scale prototype later this year.

Says Dr. Khoshnev, "A billion people today do not have adequate shelter." He envisions that this can cut the cost of new homes in less than half.

Also, the machine builds with very little waste.

If you don't have a robot but would like to cut building costs and recycle, try papercrete. It is made with recycled paper, including slick magazine paper (which is hard to recycle). It doesn't weigh as much as concrete, but still offers strength and a high r value. Plus you can cut through it and put screws into it.

Serously, that sounds good. Saves on land fill too.

you have to seal papercrete because it will wick moisture. That's one reason it is mainly used in the desert southwest-no major moisture problem.

In a few years, old fashioned home construction could be gone, unless stupid gov'ts try to protect the construction jobs.

It was a dream, long ago, that when technology allowed automation to save human effort in terms of laborious tasks, tedious tasks, manual tasks, difficult tasks, that this would usher in a golden era, where humans would be free to pursue intellectual efforts, sporting pursuits, spend many more hours raising well adjusted children, etc..

However, reality has show increases in productivity cause companies to lay off workers in order to generate extra profits. The promise of a Golden Era has been buried by layoffs and reduced wages.

The part of the dream that was forgotten was that the gains these advances provide were supposed to pass down to all men, not just be skimmed off by the few men at the top.

I don't have a solution. But I refuse to let that blind me to the existance of a problem.

All those poor unemployed buggy whip makers.

Change is part of life.

And change IS a part of life.

But that doesn't mean that we should leap into change unprepared.

For example, just how many construction companies, when they adopt the use of these house building 'bots, will make a REAL effort to retrain their human employees for information age jobs? How many will make an effort to help those employees find those jobs?

I've been exposed to such retraining programs, and they are a joke. The real intent is to avoid lawsuits and postal ex-employees. Truly helping those employees who had a hand in BUILDING the companies is of no concern when advancements take place.

I've heard employers complain that there's no such thing as employee loyalty anymore.

Small wonder.

If you want to keep those construction workers employed at their old jobs, you are going to have to charge more for that house. It will end up costing MORE because you will have the workers who won't be doing anything and the cost of the robot too.

It is easy to run in the TV cameras and show the poor laid off worker. But if you kept the price high for the houses, how about the people that would have been helped by greatly cheaper quality housing?

Nor is it as bad as you make it out to be. Unemployment in the USA is a bit over 5%, and productivity is rising. And we get to have the benefits of greater efficiency. I am able to have a computer system for well under $600.00 that would have cost thousands only a few years ago. My first system in 1988 cost over $4,000 and it was only a 286 model with a dot-matrix printer.

Nobody is owed any guarantee that their trade will still be relevant at any time in the future. In my own life, I have had to switch fields several times. Early in my life, I made it a practice to ALWAYS have a profitable hobby that could be turned into an occupation if need be, or if not a hobby to have a secondary set of job skills. And it has happened to me several times that I have had to change. I landed on my feet because I was prepared. It is like having a parachute in a plane.

I definitely don't trust a big company to do anything but look out for itself and it's bottom line, so I match that by looking out for myself and my bottom line. Why should I have to depend upon someone else to do what I should be doing for myself?

No moral sense, you see.

I was raised in poverty, so I know what I am talking about. We were so poor that when I joined the Army, it was a huge step up in my standard of living.

At Walmart. See if they can afford those houses then. Not every innovation that comes down the pike is good. I hate all this pro-business crap. "I pulled myself up by my bootstraps" so who gives a shit about anyone else.

I guess you don't care about them.

The mega-corporations owning the robots will just increase the amount of profit they take. It is just part of a downward spiral to outsource every job or replace all workers with robots who don't complain or go on stike so some EVIL FUCKING CORPORATION can pocket billions. This is about making sure the American worker will accept shit wages for what used to be good jobs because "you too can be replaced." So we can all live in identical little fucking boxes like the sheep we are.

Haven't you noticed that prices for computers are coming down? Also for lots of other electronic items? That is one example of many that shows that you are wrong, and know little about economics.

Yes, the corps will want to maximize their profits. That's what they do. But I get to choose which contractor I give my business to. Naturally, price is going to be a very important consideration, so that will be a downward force on his price. Multiply that by all the people buying houses and it becomes the dominate force.

Further, you are wrong about the homes being, "identical little fucking boxes", but then never let the facts get in the way of a rant.

In fact, the robot is even able to build curved, organic walls, which are super expensive to do now, and it can do that at no extra cost. What kind of house it builds depends on the plans that are loaded into it. Or did you even bother to read the article before you started ranting?

You presented it well. I agree:) Blinding oneself to the problem is not he answer. It is similar to the NAFTA situation in which more markets are opened, the rich make out, and the poor lose jobs. No one wanted to talk about that at the time it passed either, but look what happened.

We didn't go to the two next logical steps, alternative energy and medicine. And we didn't finish Kyoto and put pressure on developing countries to implement environmental and labor standards, which would have helped level the playing field and raised the standard of living in those countries so some of those people could purchase new technologies from us. Clinton had a plan that was not intended to just let corporations rape the world, but we put in Republicans who always exploit the people and fuck everything up.

at North America's second largest robotics company. We designed custom robotic cells to manufacture items per the client specs (Harleys, space shuttle fuel tank, other cool stuff) and we had nothing close to something that could autonomously build a house. I guarantee this guy's prototype is very, very, far removed from a commercial application.

They aren't given to running off half-cocked, and they certainly have top flight experts in all fields that they can and do check with. NASA is also on board with this. Perhaps you may want to read the article.

It's pretty good. They also like to sell issues. I'm all for this kind of entrepreneurship, don't get me wrong. I just think the kind of flexibility and design changes that a homebuilder requires today is a little beyond what a robot is capable of right now. But thanks for bringing the article to my attention.

I find this very interesting. This will someday happen but far in the future. There are so many variables involved constructing a building that I find it hard to believe it will be anytime soon.