Laying the foundation for affordable housing

What we have here is a concrete 3D printer. The whole scope of the project is to assist builders in the state with 3D printing homes, particularly aiming at low income housing. How can we build homes faster, cheaper, that are more resilient? With concrete, we are much more resilient to environmental factors, right? So hurricanes, wildfires, things like that. We cannot produce buildings fast enough. We need to be concerned about driving costs down. We need to be concerned about keeping good quality standards. And all of this kind of comes together nicely with this technology. It allows us to try to combine a lot of the different parts of the house into one operation or one process. A lot of what we're looking into is, how can the materials be something that we can source from different areas that are not as difficult to find, but also just as durable. They work just as well in the house. The concrete is just in its base form, cement water, rocks and sand for the simplest terms. 3D printed concrete is highly, highly modified versions of that. Where now we are taking those same base elements, but now adding a whole bunch of different modifiers to change the properties of that mix to be very finely tuned to actually be printable. This material that we're using right now is a preparatory mix that was provided by the instrument. So we're using the same material for our preliminary studies. Instead of adding some other additives, we're trying to incorporate locally available materials into the mix, by which we'll be reducing the cost and we'll be improving the functionality of the material too. The way that we actually make a change in the industry is we have many different disciplines. We have many different ideas at the table. We have many different people bringing their expertise. So we have material scientists, we have systems engineers, we have architecture and architectural design involved in it. We have structure and structural engineering involved in it. And then at the end of the day, how do we apply it into our industry? How do we get our industry to want to work with it? And that's where the Myers Lawson School of Construction comes in, is working to bring all these experts together, but then understand how does it translate into something the industry wants to work with.