Meet the machine that prints road

You know they say technology works with time. Now coming down to road construction a new evolution has been made.... meet this new machine that prints it road.

Engineering has seen better developments in the first two decades of the 21st century, with most of which are geared towards making life easier and getting things done much more easily with less human labour involved. But for this awesome machine, it constructs brick roads by laying them like carpets.

The road printing machine, Tiger-Stone was invented by Henk van Kuijk, director of Dutch industrial company Vanku, who thinks that squatting or kneeling down to place the bricks into the ground by hand is too much hard work.

The equipment which is as wide as a road and comes in four, five and six-meter widths and is usually fed with loose bricks. It then lays the bricks out onto the road as it slowly moves along. The machine is electrically-powered and is relatively quiet in operation with less moving body parts.

Upon completion of a road project by the machine, the constructor would only need to inspect the new road, ensuring everything is in order.

 

How the machine woks

 

Well, it may seem like rocket science or a magic, but the process is pretty simple, or not too simple.

There is a dock at the back of the machine where construction workers load paving stones or bricks into it. These bricks are then automatically arranged and packed together in a somewhat complex gravity-based process. A small telescoping forklift feeds the hopper, allowing the Tiger-Stone to lay out an impressive 400 square meters of road day, and the span can be adjusted up to six meters wide. All a worker has to do is load the bricks by hand from a hopper into the Tiger-Stone in the desired pattern.

Requiring about 3 operators, the machine is fed with bricks in a particular pattern which the machine can recognize. And after this, the machine does the job pretty good.