Monday, March 22, 2004
2:00pm - 4:00pm
MIT, Building 1- 236, Spofford Room, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
Professor Behrokh "Berok" Khoshnevis, USC
Professor Khoshnevis will be at MIT on the Monday of Spring Break, March 22, 2004. Berok is the inventor of a new technology to "print" things large and small in 3-D. In our own Technology Review, Feb. 11, they describe his 3-D printer. In Der Spiegel, they describe how he uses a robot to print or pour a house! At MIT in the afternoon of March 22, Berok would first like to give a brief seminar on these topics and then meet with MIT people who might like to work on some aspect of this problem. A particularly important aspect is the construction of earthquake- resistant homes for people of modest means in earthquake-prone regions of the world.
Sounded interesting so I went.
Turns out Professor Khoshnevis is building concrete walls in one inch layers with a robot trowel. He is planning to build 2000 sq ft houses that way, wiring and plumbing already installed, at the rate of one a day.
He calls the process contour crafting
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/...
http://www.bkhoshnevis.com
http://www.contourcrafting.org
Prof Khoshnevis estimated the final cost of such a machine might be in the range of half a million. He also believes the technique has applications for extraterrestrial construction on the moon and Mars.
I think he's really got something. It's very simple - a robot arm with a programmable trowel at the end of a nozzle ejecting quick setting concrete. You could "draw" a building layer by layer, an inch maybe more at a time.
That's indeed an interesting idea.
And an idea he's continued to pursue since 2004, one that may be a full reality soon.
Two other alternatives:
"Stone Spray is an onsite robotic 3-D printer that creates architecture out of soil."
http://www.stonespray.com
3D printed house to be built in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2014 out of plastic, one room at a time.
http://www.webpronews.com/...