Residential Rapid Prototyping
A house built in a couple of hours? No, it's not an episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition. It's an automated construction technology that just got major backing from Caterpillar and that could one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours. It's sort of like those fancy 3D printers only really, really big.
I saw the Desktop Factory 3D Printer in the Wired Living Home earlier this year and was pretty blown away. It essentially was able to 'copy' an object and build a 3d version of layer by layer in a matter of minutes. And that was only a paperweight.
Caterpillar is now putting money behind the USC School of Engineering who have been developing the 'Print a House' Contour Crafting technology. Ultimately the homes would be built using layers of concrete from CAD/CAM software and would minimize man-power and obviously the time it normally takes to build a home. They've already been able to construct 6 foot walls. Not bad. Even cooler is that the contour crafting website talks about the possible space colony applications. Nice.
Image courtesy of Flickr user froefroe
I saw the Desktop Factory 3D Printer in the Wired Living Home earlier this year and was pretty blown away. It essentially was able to 'copy' an object and build a 3d version of layer by layer in a matter of minutes. And that was only a paperweight.
Caterpillar is now putting money behind the USC School of Engineering who have been developing the 'Print a House' Contour Crafting technology. Ultimately the homes would be built using layers of concrete from CAD/CAM software and would minimize man-power and obviously the time it normally takes to build a home. They've already been able to construct 6 foot walls. Not bad. Even cooler is that the contour crafting website talks about the possible space colony applications. Nice.
Image courtesy of Flickr user froefroe
Posted by: Laure Joliet on Aug 29, 08 at 12:00 PM PDT
