Behrokh Khoshnevis is a Dean’s Professor at the University of Southern California and is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) at USC. He is active in robotics, and mechatronics related research and development projects that include the development of several novel Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing) processes such as Contour Crafting for mega-scale fabrication, SIS family of technologies for polymeric, metallic and ceramic parts and SSS for high temperature alloys and ceramics, as well as development of mechatronics systems for biomedical applications, autonomous mobile and modular robots for fabrication and assembly on earth, in space and on other planets, and specialized innovative equipment for oil and gas industry. He has numerous inventions and 70 US and international patents and over 160 refereed technical publications. Dr. Khoshnevis’ inventions routinely receive extensive worldwide publicity. Because of his Contour Crafting invention he received the 2014 Grand Prize among 1000+ globally competing technologies in the Create the Future design contest which was organized by NASA Tech Briefs Media Group and sponsored by HP, Intel and other major industries. Contour Crafting was selected earlier as one of the top 25 out of more than 4000 candidate inventions by the History Channel Modern Marvels program and the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. The technology has been exhibited in numerous science & technology and art museums around the world. Dr. Khoshnevis’ educational activities at USC include the teaching of a popular graduate course on Invention and Technology Development. He routinely conducts lectures and seminars and gives keynote speeches on the subject of invention. His TEDx talk on the subject of automated construction has been viewed more than one million times and is selected by the TED organization as one of five TEDx Moments among over 30,000 presentations.
Behrokh Khoshnevis
University of Southern California, USA
The nature of construction has remained intensely manual throughout recorded history. Unlike in manufacturing, the growth of automation in construction has been slow. A promising new automation approach is Contour Crafting (CC). Invented by the speaker, Contour Crafting is a mega-scale 3D fabrication process aiming at automated on-site construction of whole structures as well as subcomponents. The potential of CC has become evident from experiments with various materials, geometries and scales. Using this process, a single building or a colony of buildings may be constructed automatically with all plumbing and electrical utilities imbedded in each; yet each building could have a different design which can include complex curved features. The technology also has astounding environmental and energy impacts. The entry level implication is especially profound for emergency shelter construction and low income housing. NASA is exploring possible applications of CC in building on other planets. This new mode of construction will be one of the very few feasible approaches for building using in-situ material on planets such as Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the century. CC has received international attention and could soon revolutionize the construction industry.
