Where has Construction Automation been successful?

DivingForGold

3D printing of concrete homes ?

schnevets

I remember reading this article about Swedish home manufacturing two years ago, and immediately thought of the Hudson Valley (where I lived at the time) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-d... The Hudson River used to be a main manufacturing artery of the United States but has since become a relic. I still believe that region upstream of NYC could address the housing crisis plaguing the northeast of the United States. Imagine barges of housing components drifting down-river to be assembled in any coastal metro on the Atlantic coastline.

nsonha

It's kinda ridiculous that we still build walls brick by brick, on site, instead of just building most of the house elsewhere and only assemble at the site.

knollimar

You still have to solve all the MEPs so where does that go in your process?

xnx

I wonder how much of home construction efficiency improvements are held back by taste for traditional appearance vs. other cost/performance characteristics. The difference in styles between residential and commercial construction is probably an example of this. Not many commercial buildings with tar paper shingled roofs.

cortesoft

> Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Is this only calculating last mile labor, or all the labor along the way? Like, for a car, does it count the cost of steel as purely non-labor costs, or do they factor in the labor cost for mining the ore, etc? Because I feel like at the end of the day, almost all costs are 'labor' costs, they are just paid by different people/companies earlier in the process. Housing just has a lot of the labor as the final step, assembling the house on site. Cars have more of their labor at earlier stages of the process, and the assembling is mostly automated.

chrisguilbeau

I live near a 3d printed neighborhood in Georgetown, TX. We would have bought one if they'd had more than 3 bedroom floorplans. They are concrete and stay cool in the summer, they also all have solar panels... Everyone I've talked to says they are wierd looking like the movie set of Edward Scissorhands or something, but it's mainly because they didn't leave old growth trees so every tree is < 5 years old (maybe for the printer to have room to move around?) and they are very very similar. People also don't like the concrete factor. I don't know if it counts as successful but if we'd had fewer kids I'd be in one right now!

adiabatichottub

The big changes I've seen over my lifetime have been tooling and materials. I remember when framers did everything with a hammer, a circular saw, and a speed-square. Now we have nail guns and cordless impact drivers and miter saws. Fiberglass batt insulation is still a thing, but now there's also urethane spray foam. We have engineered beams and OSB sheathing pre-coated with a moisture barrier. There's a lot of things that all add up to better performance and less manual labor.

fragmede

My idea is you mass produce a housing core. A large unit with dividers but is a single big object consisting of a toilet, shower, kitchen sink, electric induction kitchen stove, dishwasher, heating/air-conditioning heat pump, and a living room wall with a TV. "Just" one giant unit to plop down as the central core of a living space, and then everything else can go up around it.