Crooked to the Millimetre

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2020/07/crooked-to-the-millimetre.html

by montalbano • 6 years ago

228 37 6 years ago

ethz.ch

ThouYS• 6 years ago

Super excited about all the new possibilities we have for designing buildings! Algorithms for the win!

monkpit• 6 years ago

Cool idea! Took me a few scans to realize ETH is unrelated to blockchain tech in this article...

iwangulenko• 6 years ago

yes, it's the MIT of mainland Europe and stands for "Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich" or Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Founded in 1855 it is older than the blockchain token!

ChuckMcM3• 6 years ago

Fun stuff! Master masons would 'tune' walls to specific applications (more load, better aesthetics Etc, and this can make that possible by non-masters. But more interesting to me is that places that previously were too cost sensitive to afford clever masonry might benefit.

The canonical example in California are acoustic "freeway walls" which are block walls that line the freeways as a mechanism for minimizing noise in the surrounding neighborhoods. The "simple" way these are build tends to just reflect the noise somewhere else, and has some really interesting effects with low clouds.

If on the other hand you could mathematically design an audio 'notch' filter out of the walls using a precise set of openings that would absorb sound and dissipate its energy into the wall, you could create much more effective sound walls. And if you could do this so that anyone working on the wall has a good chance of successfully laying out the wall correctly, then you could apply it to the miles and miles of walls that Caltrans builds every year. That would be pretty neat.

jagraff• 6 years ago

Could you elaborate on the "interesting effects with low clouds" caused by the walls? I've never heard of that before, sounds interesting

hobs• 6 years ago

Bouncing the noises.

ChuckMcM3• 6 years ago

The walls on either side of the 85 freeway (as an example) in Cupertino have occasionally set up a resonance, which when the fog as come in over the Santa Cruz mountains creates spots where you can stand and hear very odd "oooh-waaah-oooh-waaah" noises. The first time I heard it I hypothesized it was a didgeridoo being played nearby, but you could walk 100 yards in either direction and the sound would fade, only to pick up again another 100 yards or so further away.

wizardforhire• 6 years ago

Fun facts: Helmholtz Resonators [1] are used all over industry and in aerospace to do just this. For instance the shroud around a high bypass turbo fan will have a honeycomb sandwich layer with precise holes in the middle of each cell to create an array of resonators tuned to cancel out specific frequencies.

My favorite application similar but different from what you’re describing from antiquity is the acoustical effect of certain Mayan and Aztec pyramids. Here’s a video[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz_resonance

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=wsMGCF_pS-M

apprenticemason• 6 years ago

Most of the freeway walls you’re referring to are made using concrete forms and not block. I would feel extremely sorry for the company and the masons that would need to create block walls that are miles long, in no shade, during California’s summer.

I’ve worked for a masonry company for about four years and recently started my apprenticeship to become a brick block and stone mason a year ago. Working in this sector has made me truly appreciate the amount of work (Work = force*distance) that goes into any masonry. You see brick block and stone EVERYWHERE but what you might not realize is each brick, each block, each stone, has to travel from their source to their final destination. Usually that’s done by someone like me; if we’re lucky, we’re using M2 mobile hydro units coupled with a boom lift to reach whatever heights we need to hit. If we’re not so lucky, we’re building scaffolding by hand, stocking everything by hand, mixing mortar (in a mixer) by hand and using buckets to get the mortar where it need to be. It’s truly mind boggling and back breaking work. I realize this is an emerging technology but some of the masons I work with could reproduce work very close to this, maybe not mm accuracy but close enough where you’d never see the difference. And 3 months to lay ~15,000 bricks is an INSANELY long time. To put that number into perspective, a crew of 5 guys with average skill (3 masons, a laborer, and an operator making mud), given no extra equipment besides a mixer could pound out about 1000 brick in a day. That’s including everything from setup to cleanup.

Some of the guys I work with have been a mason for 40 years and they posses some incredible skill and can create amazing things and damn they’re fast too. The sad fact of the matter is most blueprints don’t want fancy masonry work anymore. It’s too cost prohibitive. We charge about $25/square foot of stone that’s without added arches or keystones or corbels etc; that also doesn’t include material costs (mortar, stone, tar paper, mesh, staples, etc). One experienced mason can throw up 100 square feet in a day, sometimes more given the differences in material. I wish we got contracts to create the beautiful buildings like in downtown Chicago or Milwaukee but it’s too much of a numbers game with real estate developers now. No one wants to pay us to create art, just slap it up and go man go!

With all that being said, man I’d like to have some time to play around with this tech! Or at least get to be the guy that holds the camera all day ;) looks like a breezy job compared to what I do everyday.

rhapsodic• 6 years ago

Props to you. I used to work as a carpenter, and I see the world differently because of it. When I walk down a city sidewalk past a brick building, I can picture what it was like, in say, 1910, when the brick facade was being laid. I'll look at a brick and wonder if it was hot, or cold, or rainy or sunny when that particular brick was bumped into its final resting place by the handle of the trowel, and I'll wonder what the mason had on his mind when he laid it.

When I used to build staircases, it always gave me pause to think that people not yet born would be walking up and down those stairs long after I'm dead. And that's the nature of your work. Your work product will outlive you by decades, or possibly centuries.

nocman• 6 years ago

Thank you for taking the time to reply to this. This was one of the most interesting replies I've read in a while here.

jacquesm2• 6 years ago

Super comment. I always use the example of masons whenever people complain that computer programming is hard work. Laying bricks is hard work, and not all that easy either. If you have basic bricklaying skills then you will be able to appreciate much better the kind of work and craftsmanship that goes into what may look like an average building.

Be careful with your back!

As for your comment on the economics: the main reason that old buildings looked so ornate and beautiful to our present day eyes is that at the time the labor costs and costs of materials were a small fraction of what they are today, and cost overruns were very common. On a relative scale the cost of building has gone up substantially which leads to every building being put up with the least amount of labor and the cheapest materials that can be found. If brick is used at all (instead of the ugly stone strips, which is a material which I think ought to be prohibited) it is in a decorative rather than a structural manner, the building itself will be made out of concrete.

The only place where you'll find some room to really use your skills is in restoration work as well as the houses for the rich. Almost everything else, including commercial buildings is done to a very tight budget.

wiz21c2• 6 years ago

Thanks for such a comment. I was hoping for it. I'm no mason but I've seen some of them work in my house. You just need to live outside university to understand that "innovation" in masonry requires a bit more than a funny augmented reality setup.

Manual work is usually the result of thousands of years of practice. And masters in their job are truly masters. That is, they do things you can only understand when you have reached some of their proficiency. I'm sad many people do not appreciate the quality of the job they do because "it doesn't look that difficult; you don't need a phd to do it".

I'm very respectful of these people (except that when you need a professional, somehow, they're always hard to find and just never start on schedule :-) just joking)

sriram_malhar• 6 years ago

Thank you for the most interesting response. I didn't think masons would find anything of interest on hacker news, but I'm glad to be proved otherwise.

nullc• 6 years ago

Computer optimized noise barriers are a thing, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_baffle#Highway_noise_bar...

Common freeway walls are cast concrete preforms, so it's easy to make them have a particular geometry.

In terms of protecting the surrounding community from the noise, the wall tops actually have a lot more impact than the wall geometry itself due to edge diffraction.

IndrekR• 6 years ago

This reminds me the graffiti robot that was painting a wall of a 5-story: https://www.robotmuralist.com/

Also heard about similar robot drawing the lines to the pavement (can not find the link just now). I think similar technologies will play a large role in building, and maybe even more importantly, building inspection.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the link,such a great invention!

anon73044• 6 years ago

Drawbot! https://www.hackster.io/news/drawbot-automatically-spray-pai...

arghwhat• 6 years ago

The mortar makes me cringe.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

Having done a little bit bricklaying during my years in construction and seeing adjustments being made after each visual hint,I can safely conclude that any reasonable size wall would cost a small fortune just on labour costs.

lalos• 6 years ago

I think the goal here is to lower the costs by increasing robotics- assisted tooling. So in theory, with time labour costs could go down or become feasible.

mihaaly• 6 years ago

Maybe it should be combined with something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Pj2GI6-xc

TedDoesntTalk• 6 years ago

technology pioneered by the ETH spin- off incon.ai allows blocks to be positioned

I had to read this 3 times to realize it has nothing to do with Etherium and blockchains

mkl• 6 years ago

We discussed another company's take on the same idea last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20673723

Pretty neat stuff.

Jolter• 6 years ago

The idea is nice, and the results are certainly striking, but seems like a stopgap measure.

Assuming this involves making CAD drawings of every brick placement, that work should be done by an algorithm, with a human doing fine-tuning if needed.

And of course, as others pointed out, if we know the exact position of every brick, the bricklaying would be perfect work for a robot. No need for a master mason if brick positions are decided by an engineer (or computer).

Current-era economics will incentivize this transition (assuming the cost of labor does not fall radically and long-term): Using a robot may not reduce the construction time appreciably, but it would move the cost from a salary expense to a capital expense. Capital will continue to be very available in the low-interest economy.

mavhc• 6 years ago

Why are all buildings artisanal hand crafted, one of a kind?

What happened to the efficiencies of mass production?

Gravityloss2• 6 years ago

I think the future of "AI" will work in unexpected ways. Computers will provide the high level instructions and humans will do the low level stuff. We'll be like police dogs.

Robots are way too expensive. It will be a long time before it is cost effective to have stair climbing robots. With car driving and navigation this has already happened. Turn right here, keep on the left.

A lot of the "AI" is just simple code, algorithms and statistics - and humans helping over some spots.

quietbritishjim• 6 years ago

This is different from driving in that there's no interaction with humans (or even other robots) or unexpected obstacles. A human can survey the building site before work begins and clear it out ready for a robot to work in. Combined with the exact pre-set plan and the large number of fine adjustments needed, this seems like the ideal task for a robot. I can see your point in general though.

Gravityloss2• 6 years ago

Good point. I guess if there must be a cage since the robot will injure any person coming close, including other people working around it, then that could cause some problems.

At some points, large companies were developing robots that could work alongside humans on assembly lines etc since they had sophisticated safety features. I don't know if they ever were commercially successful.

Crooked to the Millimetre

Related Stories