There is a fascinating type of wasp where I live called a mud dauber. These little guys are like the 3D printers of the natural world. They take individual globs of mud and, using their mandibles, shape them into layers attached to vertical surfaces in order to build cylindrical nests.
Image: Mike Dunn, Walter Magazine
You can clearly see the “print lines” on their nests. The different colors are from different types of mud, and while adjacent nests can be made from different muds, they always go mono-mud for individual nests.
Image: Pollinator, CC BY-SA 3.0
Anyway I thought of mud daubers while looking at this Charlotte robot. It was developed by two Australian firms, Crest Robotics and climate technology company Earthbuilt Technology, as a response to Australia’s housing crisis.
Like the mud dauber, Charlotte uses local materials to build. It’s hooked up to wheeled vehicle that’s loaded with sand, earth and waste products like crushed brick. The ‘bot essentially digests these, then poops out a composite material in layers to build walls.
The point of all this is that you’re not transporting construction materials to the site. “Raw materials go in. Solid walls come out. Easy,” writes Earthbuilt Technology.
“Earthbuilt® was conceived with a simple insight: the real cost and carbon of construction come from repeated industrial processing and endless transport. Our patented printer shortens the supply chain to a single, low-energy, high-speed process. Using local soil or clean waste, Earthbuilt® creates strong, durable walls without cement, firing, or manual laying.”
Earthbuilt says the robot is fast, affordable and accurate. They also envision it being used in the future to build structures on the moon.
Functioning prototypes have been built, and are reportedly on display at the currently-running International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. However, at press time we could not locate any videos of Charlotte in action.