Terran Robotics plans to use AI and clay to fight the housing crisis
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A Bloomington-based automated construction and design company is combining emerging technology with an ancient building technique in an effort to build more affordable, quality housing stock.
Terran Robotics’ homes are Adobe-style and made with earthly materials but constructed using artificial intelligence and robotics to make the laborious homebuilding technique energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and affordable.
Founders believe the 3-D printing operation is a potential strategy to alleviate the national housing crisis.
“We believe we are a solution to that,” founding designer Jacob Bower-Bir told Inside INdiana Business. “Not only do we believe that we are going to be the most affordable solution to that, but we’re going to be the most environmentally friendly and the most humane.”
How it works
The company uses materials that support structures around the world but are seldom seen stateside.
The adobe mixture consists of clay, an aggregate, and a binder, like straw. The cost of these materials is significantly lower than the market average, and there are additional savings since all of them can typically be sourced nearby or on-site. Bower-Bir says it’s dirt cheap.
All materials are natural too, Bower-Bir said, and that translates into a structure that is recyclable, regulates the environment and has benefits for human health. It also translates into being fireproof, soundproof and very sturdy, he said.
Founding designer Jacob Bower-Bir talks about how the process works and the final product.
The robot itself is very simple, he said. The cable-driven robot scoops the adobe like a claw and moves it via a conveyor to plywood. Then, the clay mixture is hammered down and formed into whatever the designers desire.
Instead of expensive hardware, Bower-Bir said they focus the operation’s complexity into the software using AI. The software enables the machine to not just place material but also to shape it as well as amend and subtract as necessary. The robot uses cameras to tell when a mistake has been made and can fix it without human intervention, he said.
“It’s looking at the reality of the situation, and it’s comparing that to the drawings that the design team has given it,” he said. “If we miss something, within a few seconds, it’s going look and be like, ‘Oh, shoot, we forgot something there. We gotta go plug that up.’ And it just does it.”
Because the machine is not just executing a program, he said Terran differs from what traditional 3-D printing companies can offer. They’ve used machine learning and reinforcement learning to get the robot to be as adaptive as it is, Bower-Bir said, and it’s getting faster every day.
Challenging familiarity
When it comes to using adobe to construct houses, Bower-Bir said there are cultural perceptions they work against at times. However, he and Terran are working to make known the untapped potential of their method.
“When people see it, they get it,” he said.
Since it’s a material uncommon to many Americans, he said some take pause when they hear about Terran’s adobe homes, often reverting to their assumptions. Especially in the Midwest, he said he wants to reach more people and bring their innovation to more neighborhoods.
“The problem is people’s imagination will be absent that visual image.,” Bower-Bir said. “And then the second problem is if they have a visual image, they think, ‘Oh, this must be the style that it can accommodate,’ when in fact, no, it can accommodate many styles.”
Another problem they run into, he said, is the pressure to make homes that look like standard American houses when they can make more creative structures with no extra labor involved. The robot can create whatever style the client desires, he said, like sleek lines or curves, modern or medieval, European or 1950s Americana.
Projects in motion
One way Terran is currently building housing is through addendums to homeowners’ properties in Bloomington. The city allows homeowners to receive permits to build accessory dwelling units, which are standalone structures (often called “granny flats”) usually with a bedroom or two on the same plot as a single-family home. Bower-Bir said they see this effort as infill housing and increasing density where more housing is desired.
“The fact that we’re adding a small house that would allow another person or family to live in that already fairly dense area—we’re increasing the density—that’s a big deal for us,” he said. “If we’re gonna solve this housing crisis, density is a big, big key.”
The company recently worked on a unit in a historic neighborhood that required the blessing of the Historic Preservation Committee. Bower-Bir said the commission’s approval and project’s later success was a “litmus test” that demonstrated they could execute projects in dense, tight areas as well as be accepted as a deviation from typical cookie-cutter construction.
Terran will next move onto a partnership in Columbus with firm Chestnut Development where they will create “pocket neighborhoods,” meaning they build several houses on one or two plots that would traditionally fit a single-family home.
The project both increases density and in turn, more housing opportunities—the company’s primary goal—but also allows them to create traditional and more creative homes that are cohesive together and with the greater neighborhood. This project is a step toward their long-term goal to create multifamily developments, he said.
Terran has received financial support via grants from entities such as the National Science Foundation, Elevate Ventures, and the Flywheel Fund in Bloomington, but support largely stems from coastal investors. The company plans to wrap up a pre-seed funding round later this year.
The company also recently partnered with San Francisco-based Autodesk and Chicago-based engineering firm ARUP, which was a designer of the Sydney Opera House in Australia.