Thinking big, researchers in California are looking to upscale 3D printing techniques to construct entire houses, including internal wiring and plumbing. The houses would be built at rapid speed and at around a fifth of the cost of current construction methods. The system, called Contour Crafting, is not limited to boxy, utilitarian designs either. The system can recreate just about anything designed using CAD software as long as it can support its own weight.

The folks at the USC Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) are the brains behind the project and they have just teamed up with the construction giant, Caterpillar, for funding to make their plans a reality.

The USC team already have a working model that can create a six-foot concrete wall, all without any kind of human input. Scaled up, the reduction in labor costs, injuries, waste and construction time will be enormous. When you consider that annual U.S. construction-related expenditures come to around $1 trillion, this new production method could be extremely beneficial both to the industry and to society on the whole.

The team believe a full-scale, automated setup could produce a 2,000-square-foot, two-story house in just 24 hours, costing around a fifth of the normal expense. Apparently NASA is interested in the team’s project too. They’re after a simple method for building bases on the Moon or Mars to save astronauts from hard manual labor (and from getting their new whites all dirty…..gotta look good for the cameras).

Check out the videos over at Contour Crafting. Blew me away. These are my faves.

Animation of whole house construction.

Prototype in action.

Installing utilities.

Sources:

Contour Crafting and USC

Via: The Register