Since we already have robots that can create common, every day things in a factory, it isn’t too hard to believe that robots could construct buildings. An engineering professor and inventor Behrokh Khoshnevis thinks he has created the Robot that can build a home in about a day. Sounds too futuristic right?

Well Khoshnevis, who is also the director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies at the University of Southern California, has been working on the Idea for about 10 years. He thinks the idea of robotic home building is simple, just a matter of having “the large-scale technology”, which is what he has been trying to fine tune. His idea is called Contour Crafting and the process is as simple as the name. A robot with one arm deposits a concrete mixture in a row, and then goes back over that first layer with another layer, rinse and repeat. Of course there is a computer giving the robot the blueprint.

Khoshnevis hopes to have a full scale building done by the fall of this year at the University of California, but only if he can create a large enough machine to support the weight and be exact enough to construct a stable structure.

The main purpose that the inventor sees for this type of robot is for affordable housing and maybe even for rebuilding after an earthquake or hurricane. “It is very early, but I think we see that it could change how at least some buildings are done in developing parts of the world and in remote sites where you don’t want to bring in a lot of outside material”.