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from the how-about-a-nice-game-of-breakout? dept.
An Australian engineer has built a robot that can build houses in two
hours[days -Ed.], and could work every day to build houses for people.Human housebuilders have to work for four to six weeks to put a house together, and have to take weekends and holidays. The robot can work much more quickly and doesn't need to take breaks.
Hadrian could take the jobs of human bricklayers. But its creator, Mark Pivac, told PerthNow that it was a response to the lack of available workers — the average age of the industry is getting much higher, and the robot might be able to fill some of that gap.
[...] Hadrian works by laying 1000 bricks an hour, letting it put up 150 houses a year.
It takes a design of the house and then works out where all of the bricks need to go, before cutting and laying each of them. It has a 28-foot arm, which is used to set and mortar the brick, and means that it doesn't need to move during the laying.
Throw in a brick-making bot and the stage is set for guerilla housing construction. Homelessness would become a thing of the past.
Apparently from: perthnow.com; a video is available on youtube.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Informative) by riT-k0MA on Sunday June 28 2015, @06:37AM
My father is a builder/construction project manager. He's currently building a polystyrene house for a client. After chatting to him I can confirm that the construction costs of the house are much higher than a traditional brick house and construction time is much, much longer. Just plastering the walls took about as long as building the shell of a normal house (cement does not stick to polystyrene when wet, requiring special, and costly, alternative techniques).
Furthermore, plumbing becomes a nightmare simply because hot water pipes can actually melt polystyrene. This means that you need to insulate the pipes going through the walls, requiring large gaps in the blocks to put the pipes (and their insulation) into, which in turn weakens the structure.
And then there's mitigating the risk of fires. Polystyrene is made from oil and forms a bonfire pretty quickly.
Also, not much is currently known about the durability of a polystyrene house. How long is it going to last? There are some mud-brick houses in the area that date back to the 1800's, and they're still standing.
Oh, and did I mention that the walls are filled with costly iron rebars for reinforcing? Polystyrene on it's own is pretty weak.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Sunday June 28 2015, @07:28PM
You make it sound like an utterly terrible material. Did you try to talk your dad out of building it?!
(Score: 1) by riT-k0MA on Monday June 29 2015, @05:23AM
The client gets what the client wants...
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday June 29 2015, @01:33PM