NEWS
TECHNOLOGYSPOTLIGHT California Startup Can Automate 80% Of Construction Process
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ighty Buildings, a San Francisco-based startup, is promising to automate as much as 80% of the construction of new homes through a combination of 3D printing, prefab techniques and the use of innovative materials activated by UV light. The company has recently launched after two years spent raising $30 million (€25.5 million) from investors. Having developed its production-as-aservice platform, which heavily relies on automated additive manufacturing to produce the housing components, Mighty Buildings claims its techniques can reduce labour hours by up to 95% and with ten times less waste. A 350-square-foot (32 square-metres) studio unit can be printed in under 24 hours, the company claims, at a market price of around $100,000 (€85,000). 3D printing has been used increasingly by many construction OEMs to print spare parts, as well as by building contractors to print smaller
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structures, but the technology has evolved rapidly in recent years. With the construction industry facing a skills shortage, as well as coming under increasing pressure to “green up” its act, there is great potential for the technology to change the construction industry in a significant way. Mighty Buildings is certified under California’s Factory Built Housing program to create units utilising 3D printing, and was the first company to achieve certification under the UL 3401 standard for evaluating 3D-printed building structures and assemblies. UL is a US company that develops and publishes technical and safety standards. “Because we’re building homes for people to live in, we’ve been very deliberate in carrying out our vision to make housing better. This isn’t software that can be debugged on the fly,” explained Slava Solonitsyn, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We’re now ready to scale our production with full confidence in our certifications and code compliance for both our material and technology.” Due to its technique and cost-saving elements, Mighty Buildings claims to reduce the cost of homes by as much as 45%.
Eric Migicovsky, partner at Y Combinator, an investor in Mighty Buildings, says: “With a strong foundation in robotics, manufacturing, and sustainability, the Mighty Buildings founding team knows the different facets of the issues that face modern housing. “Accessory dwelling units are just the start in further building out their unique approach to building.” According to McKinsey, the construction sector misses out on up to $1.6 trillion of value per year that could be unlocked with higher productivity, which is where Mighty Buildings says it can contribute. Visit: www.mightybuildings.com
China To Launch First Ever Asteroid Mining Robot Into Space
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rigin Space, a privately-owned Beijing-based company is set to launch the world’s first mining robot into space this November. Despite being described as an ‘asteroid mining robot’, no actual mining will be done. Instead, NEO-1, as the robot is being called, is a preliminary assessment - field-testing technologies designed for eventual asteroid mining. NEO-1 will most likely be launched as a secondary payload on a Chinese Long March rocket and at just 30 kg, is relatively light by spacecraft standards. It will enter its orbit around the earth at an altitude of 500 km. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Origin Space co-founder Yu Tianhong said: “The goal is to verify and demonstrate multiple functions such as spacecraft orbital manoeuvre, simulated small celestial body capture, intelligent spacecraft identification and control.” How much actual progress the NEO-1 mission can make is still subject to much speculation, given that such a mission has not been tried before. Origin Space describes the “robot” as a prospector, rather than a miner, though if successful, NEO-1 would open up a multi-billion dollar industry. While mining in space has become a staple of science fiction, the reality has yet to manifest itself. Space is still largely uncharted territory, but the race is heating up. Between Elon Musk’s repeated remarks about the colonisation of Mars, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency declaring Venus a “Russian planet”, and the European Space Agency looking at the feasibil-
ity of mining the Moon, space looks certain to be the next frontier in human expansion and privatisation. The ethics, however, of selling planets, moons and pieces of space is still being widely debated by scientists, many of whom are not in favour of the privatisation of space. A large sticking point is the question of who does one buy it from? Nonetheless, the launch of NEO-1 will most likely put those debates on the back burner as a new space race gets underway. Visit: www.origin.space
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