TECHNOLOGY

Building home quickly

Boston: MIT scientists have designed a new robotic system that can 3D print the basic structure of an entire building, an advance that would make building houses a faster, less expensive process. 

The building could also be completely customised to the needs of a particular site and the desires of its maker. Even the internal structure could be modified in new ways, researchers said. 

Different materials could be incorporated as the process goes along, and material density could be varied for optimum combinations of strength, insulation, or other properties. 

"Ultimately, this approach could enable the design and construction of new kinds of buildings that would not be feasible with traditional building methods, said Steven Keating, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US. 

The system consists of a tracked vehicle that carries a large, industrial robotic arm, which has a smaller, precision-motion robotic arm at its end. Unlike typical 3D printing systems, most of which use some kind of an enclosed, fixed structure to support their nozzles and are limited to building objects that can fit within their overall enclosure, this free-moving system can construct an object of any size.