Well, it depends when you’re going to be househunting– if it’s anytime soon, Betteridge’s law applies, but if your time horizon is a ways further out, [Miana Smith] at MIT wants to make it happen. She’s got a paper out with an open-source inchworm robot designed to assemble structures from voxels– and what is a voxel but a giant, LEGO-esque brick?
There’s a demo video below, and it’s easier to understand the motion of this thing when you see it in action. The 5 degree-of-freedom MILAbot has actuators on both ends, and no traditional base– that’s the inchworm part. It grabs a brick while anchored to one part of the structure, then stays anchored to the new brick to keep building from that locale, so on and so on.
Note that we’re not talking about concrete bricks here, though conceivably you could use an inchworm-style actuator to assemble those. The ‘voxels’ in the study are engineered space-frame blocks which come together very easily, though admittedly would make for a very drafty home– you’d want to fill them with spray foam as a finishing step. So it’s more of a framing technique than a one-and-done thing. Still it is a technique that has something to recommend it compared to the 3D-printed concrete houses that get so much hype— and are already being torn down.
For instance, the researchers find that weather the voxels are plywood, PLA, or metal, the resulting structure has less embodied energy than any concrete structure, with 3D printed concrete being worst option by that metric– though the balloon-frame stick-build we in North America consider “conventional” is still the lowest of all. On the other hand, that balloon-frame building takes a crew to put together, and labour is expensive compared to robots. At the moment, however, the study admits balloon-framing wins on price, but that doesn’t mean it always will, and it’s a fun hack regardless.
So while your next house might not be made of LEGO by a robot inchworm, we’re still grateful to [Miana] for the tip.
Most building hacks we see here are of the 3D printed variety, but don’t count out plain old dirt. For that matter, as long as someone is willing to live in it, anything can be a house– even an airliner.
Just looked it up and the common framing used in the US is now platform framing and not balloon framing.
That’s “whether” not “weather” BTW.
Interest ? Not fast, not cheap, needs non standard materials
Clay bricks are also not standardised.
The blocks could be made of rebar or wood fungus and filled with cement or insulation. The important thing for building stable structures is using more than one material (so no cement-blocks filled with cement).
Why does this thing actively strip list elements away?!
You can use XHTML and some character used in a specific manner for formatting is probably why.
Use the greater-than and less-than brackets with b for bold i for italic strike for striking text andsoforth. the solidus version to end the formatting. Classic HTML
And with (X)HTML you use the ampersand-gt format for the greater-than character and so forth.
The one important thing?
Clearly, you are a structural engineer.
There are many ancient structures made of only stone.
Granting most have been restacked for tourism.
Bricks are as standardized as they need to be.
One basic standard per market.
Then another for stick on ‘brick’. that matches the local brick dimensions.
A friend of mine built a retaining-wall behind his garage composed of massive jelly-bean giant lego-like concrete blocks about six feet long and three high.
A 6’x3′ concrete block?
Your friend must be an alien.
Is only explanation.
That’s what they were. Big lego’s made from concrete and rebar. He needed his big CASE excavator to move them. They had two recesses in the top with rebar in them for carriage. Ironically, he said they were cheaper for the volume than the smaller ones.
6x2x2 is a more common size for binblocks Larger are always cheaper because the material cost isnt the primary driver of their cost. Its time and labor involved in filling, curing, and demolding them. Smaller blocks take the same time and effort to make per unit. so despite their material costs being lower their gross costs are higher.
Something for when we start building on the moon.
That was my thought. The light frame structure of the blocks provide some structural rigidity but when moon dust is mixed with an expanding foam liquids and used to fill the voids within the blocks they could provide radiation protection and the final structural elements needed for large housing structures. Excavation of a lunar material provides on-site material for the foam and could be part of the construction. ie the only preliminary excavations are for the exterior walls and that material is used to build those walls and from then on the above ground level lunar dust cement foam is extracted from the interior lunar materials as the walls and roof are built.
No.
That’s ‘Boring company’.
Why else would ol’ Musky buy a tunneling company, if not to build tunnels to live in on Mars?
He built it to trick local governments in the SF area into abandoning their public transit projects. After all, why bother spending limited public funds when magic vacuum tunnels would shoot cars faster than the speed of sound? As soon as those projects went away, so did all activity on the tunnel construction.
The side grift of capturing investor money, cashing out at the peak, and letting the company wither and die was also a side trick.
Little disingenuous to link to an article about a failed construction that was never completed as the tearing down… I’m sure there are problems with at least some of the 3d print concrete structures out there now, and maybe some have been finished and found to be flawed enough to tear down (certainly the very early ‘lab test’ prototypes will have been). As it is a new construction method and the prototypes are almost always going to be flawed somewhere… Which also would no doubt be the case with this method too in its early days.
This is an interesting thought experiment more than anything at this stage, as what you do with your assembled lattice wall, how the first and second fix are dealt with is rather undefined and will have a huge impact of the ’embodied energy’ of the structure as a whole as well as its lifespan and ongoing maintenance costs if you actually want it to last more than a decade. To me this concept feels like it needs pairing with a sun powered sand fusing voxel 3d printer to create the lattice, with some of those latices being solid skinned on one wall – would block the gripper from interacting with that face, but being able to print your walls from a few layers of those voxel with conduit and at least a rough inner and outer skin built into the block in a durable material would be more interesting than the open frame that you somehow have to attach everything to afterwards. Can then fill with concrete and/or foam selectively for strength, insulation and weatherproofing relatively easily for a more durable and practical composite structure.
“balloon-frame stick-build we in North America consider conventional”
huh? I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone live in anything like that?
Would you need the spray foam finishing step?
I am thinking the outside would get wrapped in Tyvek and sided over. The inside would get drywall. Would that along do the job with the air trapped between those layers as insulation?
without the foam your structure would be very weak. Hollow forms dont have the same strength as filled ones.