3D printed robot builds house out of polyurethane foam in 14 hours

14 hours to build a building sounds like heaven Night Tale. However, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say that their newly developed 3D printing robot can do it!

Recently, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a new type of 3D printing robot for building large buildings.

The robot uses a manipulator mounted on a tracked vehicle to control a nozzle that can spray out polyurethane foam, which can instantly solidify into building materials. Similar to the principle of the “compass”, the manipulator can precisely spray and accumulate foam on the ground in a circle, forming two layers of walls. Then manually fill the cement between the two layers of walls. In this way, a circular building is completed. According to the measurement, the diameter of the building is 15 meters and the height is 3.7 meters. It is a circular building with an open top. The entire construction process takes about 14 hours.

Researchers hope to introduce robots into construction projects in outer space, which could one day be used to build houses on Mars, the moon and beyond.