10 replies to this topic

[Kynareth]

This is a thread about how construction of buildings will change in the future.

I'm curious about what changes will we see in the next decades in the construction process. I'm talking about commercial buildings like skyscrapers and houses also(but the first are more interesting). Today we use concrete, cement, bricks, wood, steel, aluminium and sometimes carbon fibres in recent years. We put it into one piece using human hands, cranes, smaller machines like excavators, drills and many other, some operated directly by humans like vacuum manipulators.

Much work is also done using only simple hammer or shovel .

My question is: what will happen next? Will human workers start using powered exoskeletons? When? What materials will be used? Will robots take over some duties, only directed by humans?
I believe they will but before that, workers will start using new kind of equipment(like that seen above), that will give them more strength, precision or make the work faster . What do you guys think about it?

[CyberMisterBeauty]

Skyscrapers,houses and any infra-estructure will be built using nanotechnology alone.

[Kynareth]

I wasn't precise enough. Future isn't a single point in time after which everything changes immediately. Next week is future, next month, year, 10 years etc. I'm not talking about far future but how will it change and evolve rather in the next 1-4 decades.
You can't answer every question with "nanobots will take care of that". It's quite like you would like to put me off.

[tornado64]

I think it is possible to print houses in a normal size (no skyscrapers of course). Building by robots could also come within the next decade or so. I especially think of quadrocopters here. Both will make it cheaper to build. With printing you could also realize other forms which are very expensive at the moment to build. An interesting questions is whether the both could be combined, printing bigger houses by many quadrocopters working like a 3D-Printer together.
For me a very interesting concept of building are so called earthships http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship using mainly waste and earth as material, if I would ever build a house, it would be something like this. It is completely off-grid, sustainable and autonomous.

Edited by tornado64, 22 May 2012 - 02:08 PM.

[GNR Rvolution]

If you want to split it down into time periods, I guess I would hazard the following:

Near-Term (next 5-10 years): 3D / 4D CAD and the advent of 3D printing will allow us to design and build structures much more cheaply (but no less effectively) than traditional methods. I think the work-force though will be predominantly human still. However this will still be limited to residential or other small constructions.



Medium-Term (10-50 years): Robotic assembly will begin to take hold, with manual labourers only brought in for some of the more complex jobs. A demo was shown recently (below), this is pretty incredible already but I think that commercial development and use of this is some way off. We may also see new materials in construction begin to appear, based on the material science developments (e.g. Graphite) that are occurring now.



Long-Term (50+ years): Here we will see the development of all kinds of crazy stuff, from buildings that are grown use nanotechnology, the potential use of claytronics to allow buildings to change shape / design to suit the owner, the integration of self-generating energy walls.

Of course, all of this relies on a sustainable economy and plenty of materials to do the job, both of which could change drastically in this time. We may find ourselves resorting to materials not mentioned above if scarcity plays a part, or changing the designs to accommodate climate change or some other global trends.

Edited by GNR Rvolution, 22 May 2012 - 11:48 AM.

[tornado64]

The easier way would be printing smaller parts in the exact size and shape and with quadrocopters bring it to the right direction. You would just need to provide the material and the building could be build completely autonomous. I think that would be an amazing way to build, I think it could be also cheaper to build than the normal way.

Edited by tornado64, 22 May 2012 - 02:07 PM.

[Logically Irrational]

I think that in the short term, we will that prefabrication technology will become popular. I imagine that it will become more popular because of increased speed and efficiency, as well as reduced waste. From what I can tell, it seems to be confined to China currently, but other construction companies will probably start using the method this decade.

http://www.reuters.c...E84D0FQ20120514

As far as mechanization goes, I think GNR summarizes it nicely.

[Craven]

The easier way would be printing smaller parts in the exact size and shape and with quadrocopters bring it to the right direction. You would just need to provide the material and the building could be build completely autonomous. I think that would be an amazing way to build, I think it could be also cheaper to build than the normal way.

Quadrocopters have very limited lifting capacity. And constructing building is "little" bit more complex than stacking things one on another.

[tornado64]

The easier way would be printing smaller parts in the exact size and shape and with quadrocopters bring it to the right direction. You would just need to provide the material and the building could be build completely autonomous. I think that would be an amazing way to build, I think it could be also cheaper to build than the normal way.

Quadrocopters have very limited lifting capacity. And constructing building is "little" bit more complex than stacking things one on another.

It just depends on how big they are. The lifting capacity is not bad for a aircraft/helicopter it can lift about the same of its own weight. Helicopters never reach that much. You just have to change how you build, it could be more like LEGO.

[Craven]

That proportion will be smaller for larger quadrocopters, that's how it works. And somehow I'm not convinced they will "just change how you build". If it was that simple you'd build only with cranes

[Logically Irrational]

It would probably be easier with prefabricated pieces, but even then, a lot of the construction methods are the same.