3d-printer for building assembly

You'll have seen concrete pouring trucks of the kind that have the large boom arm attached so that they can direct concrete to an area further than the truck can reach (as opposed to the trucks which just up-end and dump it straight on the ground.)

Now imagine that boom arm with a motor attached rather than being manually guided, and the motor driven by a computer.

We now have a large scale 3D printer for concrete.

Now, you probably would not be able to just pour a house with solid walls and not expect it to all glug down to the floor, but you *might* be able to robotically put some shielding in place that would form a wall cavity which you then filled with concrete. Or you could put up a dummy building in polystyrene, surround it with a different kind of foam (such as the kind you mix two liquids to create, as is used to make custom seats for race-car drivers), then melt off the polystrene version leaving a cavity to be filled.

Or you could pour into plastic bags that are sort of brick shaped... I can think of lots of ways to build up a structure that could be filled with concrete - automatically.

A fleet of these trucks could throw up a small town in no time, such as for disaster relief.

My bet is that a house design that affords easy and automatic construction will not look anything like current homes. It may look like a geodesic dome, or maybe like Fred Flintstone's somewhat organic looking house. It might look like Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater". These homes could start a new fashion trend in housing and become a plaything of the extreme rich as much as of the extreme poor, changing their home design every year...

The main point here is that a solid, safe, and livable building should be built without significant human intervention, by a computer-controlled truck, as fast as concrete can be poured and set.

G