Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Thursday, March 11, 2004News Items
A friend pointed out this interesting article from New Scientist on a robotic extruder that can 'print' houses like an ink jet printer or rapid prototyping machine using concrete or a cob-like adobe mixture. This page at the University of Southern California noted on Slashdot offers detailed images and some animations.
The concept is similar to things I had explored myself when studying robotic means to amplify my own limited 'sweat equity' for housing. But I had to abandon the notion when the robots proved too large and expensive for me to build by myself. Nice to know I was at least on the right track. Though one can expect some avant garde designers to toy with it, it seems likely that this new robot will prove more successful for industrial and commercial construction than mainstream housing because residential contractors and developers are still prejudiced against concrete and utterly ignorant of adobe. It may also offer possibilities for use in space habitat construction in environments where there is some water available for construction use.
This other robot article should also be of some interest. This robot should look familiar to readers of my MUOL space station proposal of some time ago, featured in this article in the Distant Star journal. The Modular Unmanned Orbital Laboratory was a proposal for a low cost on-orbit tele-operated facility intended to do the job of orbital industrial engineering research that should have been the primary job of the ISS. This new robot uses exactly the same scheme of design and mobility proposed for the MUOL service robots; switching a simple robot arm with a universal end-effector interface on both ends from one modular moveable anchor pad to another and using modular pallets of interchangeable tools. Nice to see the idea validated but it's also another frustrating reminder of what I could be doing if I wasn't sick all the time...
Also, I recently noticed some new updates on the N55 web site mentioned elsewhere on this site including a new section on the N55 space frame pontoon boat, a 'barmobile', new photos for the combination space frame house and floating platform, and a collection of music soundtracks composed for the various N55 manuals. I'm constantly amazed by all the clever post-industrial inventions coming from these European design groups. There should be more Americans involved in such work but for the moment the only American designer doing such things today seems to be Andrea Zittel.
