3D-Printed in 24h, no waste. Price to fall as builds ramp-up

the united states we're still building in many cases using 100 200 year old technology the construction sector is really the last industry that is yet to embrace new technology in order to unlock efficiency right now there's something like 400 000 construction jobs in america that no one's taking and so we want to bring technology back into it [Music] so what we're doing is really taking some of the most dangerous and difficult parts of the build because house framing is one most dangerous jobs in america and so this gives us a chance to use the 3d printing in robotics because the reality is we just don't have enough people to build so our goal is really to provide a new tool for industry yeah so basically as you can see so this is the right now the world's largest 3d printer 450 square foot and so now they're currently printing part of the panels for a home unit so what are you using to print so we actually invented our own construction material to replace concrete yeah so what you see in this barrels yeah is our lsm our light stone material it basically cures immediately and hardens immediately when you go through the 3d printer so which part of this for example this model here is printed so i'll show you so basically the curve is 3d printed so the reason why we were in stealth is because we actually had to get certification because technically like we are the first company ever to like incorporate 3d printing in a residential unit so this is a fully 3d printed unit so this was 3d printed in 24 hours so we printed the floor the walls you know the ceilings and like the curved area as well [Music] printing the entire shell in 24 hours it really showed what the technology and what the material can do and one of the really cool things is that unlike 3d printed concrete we didn't have to stop and let it cure and add rebar pour concrete into the walls and everything we really could just print it in 24 hours so the material we're using is a proprietary thermoset composite that we call light stone material so a thermoset composite means it's still using polymers but unlike a thermoplastic it doesn't heat so what arts uses is a combination of minerals recycled glass and a polymer as a binder and what's cool about it is that instead of using heat and curing over time by cooling we actually cure it with light so it gets hit with uv and that's what that purple light you see behind there is uv light hitting it as it comes out allowing to support its own weight opens up the ability to print different shapes different forms but the cool thing is we still get full chemical cohesion between the layers so it's not like concrete where if we take a break we have to worry about that mechanical adhesion we actually end up with a fully monolithic structure when the printing is done yeah so literally you can feel like it's 3d printed right like the lines so this is like the printer has gone over that correct okay so as you see there's now like the printer goes zigzag so that's what happens when you 3d print but this is the material as you can see like it's it's actually like a wall like a proper wall yeah it's pretty crazy so they print one wall and then how does it work yeah so usually like the print panels and they assemble it together as you can see like it's all assembled together and there's a little bit of steel support correct so we still have to incorporate like traditional you know home construction you still need to have steel support because that's part of like the law the regulatory we can't change that we have printed a full shell of one of our mighty studios that's not actually what we're currently delivering and that's really a part of our iterative approach to the regulatory process because the reality is is there's an understandable conservative within building regulators and so to address that we've been moving incrementally so this is actually our prototype where is fully 3d printed yeah and then this is only the curve it's a hybrid unit so as you can see the workers are assembling it so we use partial traditional home build and 3d printing [Music] it's still 90 less construction waste than a traditional home built [Music] the whole idea for us is that we want to automate it 80 well this is the uh the control center of our big g printer as you can see we've got vinay here hard at work running running the controls and it's also fully hammered up and connected to the cloud so we're actually able to have our r d team working on it remotely and be able to monitor everything so there's not a lot of hands-on i mean that thing goes right yeah i mean that's one of the nice things is because our goal at the end of the day is to actually eliminate about 90 to 95 of the labor hours but also increase the amount of work overall by increasing that productivity so how how much labor does this require to build a house yeah so we've got two different products we're got our mighty mod which is kind of like a tesla roadster we're taking a 3d printed curved wall combining it with a traditional steel frame box so in that regard it ends up being a hybrid then we've got the mighty kit system which is what they're printing here one of the panel actually no this is a curve for the mighty for the mighty mods but we also have our mighty kit system which we're moving through certification right now which is more like our model s insofar as the entire exterior wall system is 3d printed it's a modern product but one that comes at a lower cost than you would get for similar quality if it's stick belt so so as i mentioned with the production units we're just doing the curved walls 3d printed but we do have the ability to fully print a shell and so this is actually the first prototype we have beat the heck out of it we have driven this from redwood city to here all over the bay we've dropped it a couple times and so you'll you'll notice there's a little wear and tear little spots here and there but all in all it held up remarkably well the wall here yes yes you can see it's at a 45 degree angle so we are testing a new printing head that can actually rotate and print at different angles so you can see down here was at one angle then we switched it just because we could just to test the different angles and then switch to this angle and then we were able to do printing across the roof up through the curve as well so what did you find out about the different angles we found this worked really well for allowing us to get that height and get that angle because it allows but frankly we're also able to do just flat as well so it really depends on the needs of the project [Music] but it really was great i mean this was less than 24 hours to print this entire shell and then finishing everything out was a few other a few more days with the flooring and and the doors and everything but all in all pretty quick build and even with our hybrid units we're able to build those in about a week [Music] and the mods are cool because when they arrive they're fully finished this uh unit here will actually be going to a customer in mountain view and so it's one of our two bedroom two module units essentially with these we take our studio module which is what this basically is put a couple doors in it and then we add a second module that instead of having the bathroom pod uh utilize that space for a closet yeah and on the one bedroom it actually the closet starts here and it's a full walk-in closet with a full bedroom uh on this side yeah this is the 700 square foot so usually it's 350 square foot it comes on its own and if you want a bigger unit it's a modular so it's it's stuck together yeah so this is like that this is a two bedroom um adu so usually it comes everything comes um the kitchen the sink the fridge you know everything comes together with the adu and then as you can see like the bathroom is a full shower yeah it's a proper like you know adu so this part is all 3d printed like the curves and [Music] so it comes delivered to your house uh-huh so it's basically what happens is like everything's printed and assembled here put it on an oversized trailer and crane into your backyard so this would be an actual second home went away going into a backyard exactly and the reason we started with accessory dwelling units is the state of california has made them really easy to permit over the last three years starting with laws that went to effect january 2017 and so adu has made a lot of sense for us because it's a niche market that's growing quickly but because of the size of adus it's hard for bigger developers and builders to actually make them because it doesn't pencil out because the overhead costs associated are just very difficult for them so we saw it as a great opportunity to get to market show what we could do build out our certification portfolio get the experience of going through the entitlement process and really delivering for customers without competing against builders and developers we've always seen as one of our long-term customer bases along with homeowners so basically the windows would go on afterwards oh no so it gets shipped like oh yeah so yeah so but again on this one just the curve is 3d printed but as once we complete the certification of our new panel system we'll actually be expanding the amount of 3d printed material on these units as well it's part of our iterative approach because we're bringing such a novel and unique technology into a heavily regulated industry i mean the reality is that the building codes are written in blood and we want to make sure that we're actually getting ahead of that because we don't want 3d printing to get in the code only after something goes wrong it's really important for us that we're demonstrating that safety and providing that opportunity to get it in before then so that we can avoid something going wrong and people getting hurt so that's why we've moved iteratively to make it easy as possible for building officials to say yes and allow us to begin delivering units while we continue to demonstrate and build out that certification portfolio and demonstrating that safety additionally we've been working really closely with ul underwriters laboratories to evaluate our technology for various use cases that we need it for and what's come out of that is the world's first standard for 3d printed construction and that's been used as the basis for appendix aw in the 2021 international residential code and so that means that jurisdictions that use the irc can actually take that appendix and plug it into their local codes and even those that don't formally adopt it will have the opportunity to at least look to it for guidance for 3d printing construction and so for us that's part of what we've been doing and why it took us so long to come out stealth mode is that we're doing a lot of work to really line up that regulatory side of things so we also work with the world's largest standards making bodies on developing their new standards for 3d printing construction as well because again we feel so important that we're doing everything we can to demonstrate safety of our technology yeah and so the printing though is is actually just the first part of what we do so that's kind of the very really cool thing is even though our material is really strong [Music] and the fiber reinforced material has a strength profile similar to reinforced concrete it's still soft enough that we can mill the surface with cnc heads are normally used for metals like aluminum and copper [Music] and so you can actually see here what the team's doing is they're doing a initial 3d scan so what this does is we've got built-in quality control in the printing process itself and then comes over here to the finishing cell where we do a 3d scan to make sure it matches the digital file is based off of while also creating a digital file of the physical object to create tool paths for milling of the surface because using heads for aluminum copper allows us to mill the exact tolerances we need for the panel placement but also opens up opportunities for creating a smooth stone-like finish if the customer wants [Music] one of the exciting things about 3d printing is that to go from one design to another you just need to change the file and because we're using a printer because of a lot of those features our goal is to really be able to go from one design to a completely different design with more or less zero marginal cost so what you're seeing here is an early prototype of the mighty kit system the idea here is that instead of delivering fully finished modules we actually deliver a flat pack panel system similar to like a sears kit home from the 20s and 30s but upgrade updated for the 21st century and so what's exciting about this is that we're actually unlocking the ability to use our material as exterior finish air barrier water barrier thermal barrier fire barrier vapor barrier so it provides superior energy efficiency for the structures and right now this is not a clad i mean what we're seeing here yeah this is just painted this is our material with paint so could this be like you'd buy a sips panel exactly and unlike a sips panel it wouldn't need all that additional layers of finishing on site the idea is that can more or less be like stip sips panel on steroids there's a way to think about it because it adds those additional layers of finishing that you just don't have currently with sips with these the roofs and the floors will still be traditional and same with interior walls but the entire exterior wall system will be 3d printed and so it's great because it allows a versatility of floor plans when we work with builders and developers and so the new mighty kit system that's actually will be the primary unit that we're deploying in rancho mirage as part of the world's first zero net energy community so the idea there is to not only provide a beautiful right-sized home but to create a second unit that they can use as a guest house as a rent passive income for rental or just a pool house it really kind of opens up the possibilities of what the space can be what we're seeing here is looks like a one bedroom yeah this has a one bedroom drill so one of the things you can see from here is if you see that kind of metal scaffolding in there that's actually a bathroom pod so we don't build the bathrooms ourselves we've identified a group of suppliers so we actually have prefabricated bathroom units come fully finished and we can just install them in an hour or two so it saves us those five to 800 hours that would normally take to build it and so that's something we've actually borrowed from the ship building industry because if you go in korea if you're building a ship they can build a thousand foot ships in a week and a lot of that is because it's all about plug and play and so that's something we're doing with our units as well with the steel that we're using it's prefabricated pre-cut so when it arrives here it's just a matter of plug and play and we're following the same idea with the kit system in terms of everything you need is delivered to site and it's just assembled so there's basically no on-site construction it's just on-site assembly this is what is in between the walls to create the installation yeah so we use pu foam technology to basically like control the temperature and stuff like that so i see in the roof there is probably more insulation yes right so this is it's a traditional method where you know so in traditional home it's like this too yeah this we have to keep it because it's part of like a certification yes yeah so we can't so as much as we want like we've done like a fully 3d printed home but unfortunately you know regulations you have to go through like different certifications like so we are actually um introducing a newer generation of this material which is actually like more sustainable and it's like ten times tensile strength stronger and two times lighter so the finishes you can do i mean you can actually print almost everything yeah and that's really where we're going is that while we have our designs we're delivering currently our long-term vision has always been to be a production as a service platform for the industry and so even though that's actually one thing i really like about our initial version here that is a hybrid is that really highlights that our technology can play well with existing technologies or be deplo as with our new system be deployed more independently and also take advantage of local economics by having a distributed system of factories that we would place in areas where there's manned near where labor force is i mean for example here in oakland we're not old pete's coffee warehouse so we're in a situation where we're right next to the port we're right next to the airport right next to the highway heart of the industrial center so we're not set up hours away from where the demand is and hours away from where the labor is and that's our vision for as we expand is finding the right builder developer partners to really help us tap into those local markets making sure that we're using local economics because god knows it does not make sense to export california construction costs anyway [Music] you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 862,499

Keywords: 3d printed home, 24 hour printed home, construction 3d printing, xl 3d printers, additive manufacturing, autonomous robotic construction, construction waste, accessory dwelling unit, prefab construction, mighty buildings, building codes, 3d printed building codes, sears kit homes, kit homes, polymer construction, uv cured printing, oakland, construction techniques, future of building, extractive construction, additive construction, printed home, ADU, A.D.U., california

Id: TxO46yjE8dI

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021

Reddit Comments

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[u/ZeroNullAnon]

I kinda feel like it'd be cheaper and faster to just extrude the outer shell rather than print it.