You can be on Entrepreneur’s cover!

Watch a 3D Printer Make an Entire Building The bot's mechanical arm is fitted with nozzles that can spit out any number of substances used in building construction, such as concrete or insulation.

By Tom Brant

entrepreneur daily

This story originally appeared on PCMag

MIT | Youtube

Forget blueprints and general contractors: why not just 3D print your entire house? One day, you might be able to, if a new autonomous 3D printing robot designed by MIT researchers ever goes on sale.

The robot is an ungainly contraption full of solar panels, a crane and running on treads instead of wheels. But because it's capable of printing the walls and other basic elements of an entire building, MIT says it could enable the design and construction of new kinds of structures that would not be feasible with traditional building methods.

The robot printer is very different than consumer 3D printers on the market today. Instead of assembling its assigned printout in an enclosure, the MIT bot's mechanical arm is fitted with nozzles that can spit out any number of substances used in building construction, such as concrete or insulation.

To prove it works, the MIT engineers used it to construct a 50-foot-diameter, 12-foot-high dome made out of polyurethane foam and concrete. The entire project took less than 14 hours of "printing" time, which presumably doesn't include the time it took to configure the robot with the required materials. And therein lies the challenge: the robot could be used on a building site right now, but it would likely require excessive handholding that would make it inefficient compared to other more conventional machines.

So the robot's real promise, according to former MIT engineering student Steven Keating, who helped designed it, lies in achieving full autonomy: a built-in scoop could both prepare the building surface and pick up local materials like dirt for an earthen structure, while the bot goes about its business needing no more electric power than what the sun offers.

Keating wants "to have something totally autonomous, that you could send to the moon or Mars or Antarctica, and it would just go out and make these buildings for years," he told MIT News. Given his choice of example building sites, though, it's safe to say that you won't be able to build your next suburban tract house with this bot any time soon.

Tom Brant

News reporter

Tom is PCMag's San Francisco-based news reporter. 

Want to be an Entrepreneur Leadership Network contributor? Apply now to join.

Editor's Pick

Growing a Business

To Achieve Sustainable Success, You Need to Stop Focusing on Disruption. Here's Why — and What You Must Focus on Instead.

Instead of zeroing in solely on disruptive innovation, embrace a pragmatic approach to innovation, recognizing and leveraging the potential within ongoing industry shifts.

Business News

Mark Zuckerberg Says This CEO Is the 'Taylor Swift' of Tech

Meta's CEO posed with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Instagram Wednesday.

Real Estate

3 Emerging Trends Shaping the Future of Real Estate

These three innovations are reshaping the real estate industry — discover tips for effectively covering these trends.

Leadership

What We Have to Gain By Talking About Grief and Loss At Work

I lost my husband to cancer during Covid — here's how it changed how I lead at work.

Side Hustle

This Mom Started a Side Hustle After a 'Shocking' Realization in the Toy Aisle. Her Product Was in Macy's Within the Year — Seeing Nearly $350,000 in Sales.

Elenor Mak, now founder of Jilly Bing, didn't plan to start a business — but the search for a doll that looked like her daughter inspired her to do just that.

Fundraising

Avoid These 9 Pitch Deck Mistakes When Asking Others For Money

Crafting an efficient pitch deck requires serious effort, but at least it's not wandering in the dark since certain rules are shaped by decades of relationships between startups and investors.