Cup of Joe - Joe's Take on Manufactured Housing and Robotics
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- Cup of Joe
Joe's take on manufactured housing and robotics
Can it work? Sure. But it is hard.
What limitations do you have? What complicates matters for the enclosure? For the structure? What could we do right now to make site building easier? Since robotics will still need good judgement applied and good judgement comes from experience and often, bad judgement, are there any alternatives?
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I’m not a home builder…just a dumb architect…but I have often wondered why the Sears kit house “model” didn’t really continue far past its pre-WW2 heyday.
Perhaps it wasn’t scalable…or perhaps commodity production builders just got so good that they could essentially recreate this on a large scale with their lumber and materials suppliers.
Of course factory houses HAVE caught on, in terms of what we call "pre-manufactured homes", they're here to stay. It's just a debate whether you want them or not. I have a couple recent examples. Right on a main street (well the corner of an side street adjoining the main street), there appeared a row of tightly spaced double-wides. I thought surely they were just parked there temporarily--- but they stayed, with a row of little detached garages in the back! Apparently it was a planned unit development that the city approved to help with housing requirements. Just seems odd. because, nice as they are, they look like they belong in a "mobile home' park. Another example we were asked to help with some minor renovations on a small 2 1/2 wide manufactured home in a residential neighborhood. It sort of looks like a regular house by the way they did the roof, but it's not pretty at all and sold (new house garage and lot) for upwards of $900,000. Not sure who made out on that one, but--in the end-- it was likely not that different in building costs to the same cheap house built in place.
We've long had a lot of pre-framing in tract homes. Wall sections are often put together off-site and then you use pre-manufactured trusses. But usually the walls are framed manually. I think robotic framing machines would be faster and more accurate. Possibly these can be made more portable. You have to compare that though with the speed an experienced crew can frame walls in the first place. Add in that we are getting better tools all the time. So maybe some more automation and standardization closer to the jobsite will be the way that robotics, standardization and modern manufacturing ( taditional factory advantages) can help. You also need some help to make foundations faster more accurate, otherwise your off-site work won't fit.
The BS&Beer crowd's head explode everytime Joe talks. I love it.
While I appreciate your insights, I'd like to suggest a different lens.
I'm on a listserv called Tradarch, which focuses on traditional building. We had a lively debate on automation, and a sculptor spoke up to say that he was happy to have a CNC machine cut away most of the stone so he could concentrate on the expressive detail. (If you get on that list you can get his name, but I don't feel comfortable mentioning it. Suffice to say he's a recognized traditional sculptor.) That's the kind of thing robotics can do to support craft rather than replace it.
I'm also aware that a team from Stuttgart built a timber and plywood dome out of jigsaw-like geodesic pieces. That dome required a degree of precision that is almost impossible by hand. That precision allowed the team to prefabricate a complex dome with uniquely-shaped panels out of ordinary materials. Geodesic domes that have used that simple structure since the '60s have either had to limit the number of unique shapes or have had to use a strut system of carefully-calculated chord members.
I think this is where robotics can help. It can help us to fit things precisely and to "truth" conditions in the field using LiDAR-generated point-clouds and photogrammetry. In fact, that's one of the first real-world uses of Boston Dynamics's Spot robot. If we have such point-clouds, then we can use either precise robotics or just careful humans to do things like prefabricating a new wall to fit into a slumping 500-year-old timber frame English Hall.
As for prefabrication, I think you probably see where this is going. If we can prefabricate panels to fit together precisely, then we can get the structural part of the structure to fit together precisely in the field. That said, your "perfect" walls, roof, and foundation require continuous membranes, insulation, and rain-shedding layers. The problem isn't fitting the together as wrapping all those layers continuously and getting the outside on right. That means that in addition to precision, robot-human teams will need to tape, caulk, seal, spray, and then affix a raincoat on the building. That's more of the job than just the structure - and it's one the Stuttgart dome didn't contend with.
As for 3D printing: it just isn't all that compelling until you can print roofs, floor/ceilings, and foundations. To be fair, Mighty Buildings can do them, but only with a Corian-like material. I look forward, though, to a robot that can place something akin to a Catalan vault or a Guastavino tile vault. It just requires some dexterity, precision, and mastery of the mortar mix.
Finally, I agree with your idea of bringing the factory to the site. Suppose a city with a housing boom decided to reconstruct a large area. A factory could match its pace of production to its potential to meet the real estate industry's ability to absorb housing. it might be able to tool up a factory to handle a 7-year production schedule using only ordinary streets and not expressways. In that case, the factory might just have to truck some oddly-sized panels up to 30 minutes away on ordinary roads. (This would be a bit like concrete today.) When the construction boom is done, the factory could then enjoy a second life as a home base for refurbishment projects tailored precisely like the new wall in a 500-year-old Hall.
I hope this provokes some thought and comments on your vlog.