Transcriber: Bob Prottas Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
Maslow, the renowned American psychologist,
identified the pyramid of human needs,
at the base of which are the two essentials,
food and shelter.
So shelter is the topic of my presentation tonight.
At the dawn of the 21st century,
unfortunately this is the condition of shelter
for nearly 1 billion people in our world.
These slums are the breading ground for disease,
crime, illiteracy,
and over population.
Naturally governments are after solutions.
They are after finding ways to change the situation.
However, what they're facing is a problem
of conventional construction,
the current construction methods that we employ.
They are generally slow.
They are labor-intensive and inefficient.
If you look around yourself,
pretty much everything is made automatically today.
Your shoes, your clothes, your home appliances, your car.
The only thing we still build by hand are these buildings.
Construction is the most hazardous job.
It is more dangerous than mining and agriculture.
In this country it kills 10,000 people every year,
and there are about 400,000 injuries every year.
Eventually these translate into costs
to the society and homeowners.
Construction, the way it's done today, is very wasteful,
and generates a lot of emissions.
And because of all the different trades that are involved in there,
and the difficulty of the management process in construction,
the process is pretty corruption prone.
It is very costly,
and is always over budget.
So, what we have been focusing on
is finding a solution to this problem.
Our solution, basically,
benefits from advanced technology.
I named this process 'Contour Crafting',
and it is essentially a way
of streamlining the process of construction
by benefiting from the experience that we have gained
in the domain of manufacturing.
In manufacturing there's a process called CAD/CAM.
Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing.
A lot of things you see are designed on computers
and without any human interference,
are sent to the production machinery that automatically make
those products that you use.
So we want to scale up those processes,
and bring them to the realm of construction.
This, of course, has been
the desire of a lot of engineers, and technologists.
There have been problems, there have been difficulties
in such a transition.
Recently, there has been
development in the field of fabrication.
You probably heard about 3D printing of 3D objects.
So Contour Crafting is basically scaling up 3D printing
to the scale of buildings.
What we are hoping to generate
are entire neighborhoods that are dignified,
at a fraction of the cost,
at a fraction of the time,
far more safely,
and with architectural flexibility that would be unprecedented.
So the buildings that will be built, of course,
will not be as homogenous as these.
Every building can be very different.
They do not have to look like tract houses,
because all you have to change is a computer program.
The architectural design
is basically sent to the machine directly.
This animation shows the concept.
The material, which is cementitious,
initially concrete,
is deposited through a nozzle,
and the building is built layer by layer.
In the process,
a lot of things can be done,
including automatic reinforcement,
automatic plumbing,
automatic electrical network installation.
And once the basic structure is done,
there could be other automated processes
that would do auxiliary operations such as
finish work, tiling, and even painting
using ink-jet printers, the kind that print billboards.
So, in the end, the whole building can be ready
in an unprecedented time.
We anticipate an average house,
a 2,500 square foot house,
can be built in about 20 hours,
custom design.
The model that you see here is pretty simplified,
because I didn't want to make the animation difficult for my students.
But you can imagine that the walls
do not have to necessarily be rectilinear.
They can use any kind of curve,
therefore you can really execute
very exotic, beautiful architectural features,
without incurring additional costs.
This clip shows how reinforcement,
plumbing, and electrical installation can be done.
So rather than using continuous rebars,
we can have segments of rebar
automatically inserted and assembled inside the building.
So this wall is being reinforced
by a two-dimensional mesh of steel.
Likewise, plumbing elements could be installed
while the building is being erected.
As you know, currently every one of these activities
involve their own trade.
So for electrical network installations
you can have these polymeric blocks with conductors
that carry electricity,
and communication signals.
This is one of the machines that we've developed.
As you see,
the nozzle is secreting pretty dense concrete.
This concrete is high performance,
and it is mixed with fibers, composite fibers.
It gives you pretty good strength.
This particular wall has a 10,000-psi strength.
The average concrete structures that you see
typically are about 3,000 psi, pounds per square inch.
This wall is hollow,
therefore it does not use as much material, it's lighter,
and has good heat [insulation] characteristics.
This is a typical machine
that will be used for this technology.
This particular machine, that you can see here,
can replace existing mobile homes,
referred to as tornado magnets.
You can have different kinds of configuration for these robots.
This is for a single detached residential building.
You can have a multi nozzle machine,
that will be good for large buildings.
These nozzles work concurrently,
or you can have the machine climb the building.
Look at this old structure.
This is about 200 years old.
It's a beautiful adobe structure built in one of the most
earthquake prone regions of Iran, in the City of Kashan.
It stands erect still, after all the experiences that it has had of shaking
because of the wonderful geometries that are used in here.
Rectilinear walls are the worst kind of structures,
as far as strength is concerned.
The inside of these buildings can be pretty, homey, organic,
and the patterns that are used
for building these are pretty ingenious.
Those people are no longer accessible
in a lot of places in the world,
and if they are, they'll be very expensive.
However, with robotic system we can mimic those patterns
and build those beautiful structures automatically.
And we can even use the in-situ material
to build structures without support beams.
So our current project that is supported by NASA,
aims at using the technology to build Lunar structures,
such as landing pads, roads,
hangers for the landers,
support walls, radiation protection walls.
So these are some of the structures that are built,
this could be a lunar fuel vessel.
What we expect to offer with this technology,
is significant reduction in the cost
by reducing the cost of financing, the cost of materials,
and of course, significantly reducing the cost of labor.
Compared to 'Emergency', 'Prefab Manufactured',
'Prefab Modular', and 'Conventional Construction',
'Contour Crafting' will offer the highest architectural flexibility
with a cost that is only higher
than 'Emergency' building construction today.
And as far as construction speed is concerned,
nothing will beat Contour Crafting.
CO2 emission is a small fraction of the current emission,
and the energy usage by the technology is also very low.
So therefore, the technology
is extremely environmentally friendly.
Contour Crafting as a disruptive technology will have
a number of impacts, including economic impacts,
employment impacts, social impacts,
regulatory, environmental,
and architectural impacts.
With respect to employment impact,
I should just make a remark that
there is a lot of concern about
people being put out of construction jobs.
The reality is that
a lot of new jobs can be created in this sector as well.
Currently women and the elderly
do not have much opportunity to work in the construction industry.
With new technologies like Contour Crafting,
those groups of people can also be employed
in more creative activities of construction.
At the beginning of the previous century, around 1900,
62% of Americans were farmers.
Today less than 1.5% of them are involved.
The world did not come to an end
as a result of utilization of agricultural technologies.
And the same will be true in the case of construction.
There will always be better economies
resulted from advancement,
and utilization of technologies
that just makes sense.
Thank you.
(Applause)