CrafTrans - CC Corp's Transformable and Rapidly Deployable Construction 3D Printer
Over two decades ago Contour Crafting® marked the beginning of the construction 3D printing era. Contour Crafting Corporation aims to advance its technologies to revolutionize construction in building, infrastructure, and space construction fields.
Contour Crafting®
This timeline depicts the history of the Construction 3D Printing field - Produced by ELstudio, Amsterdam
Introducing Contour Crafting® Technology
Applications
Applications of the CC Corp technology may include various types of building constructions including housing, commercial and government buildings. Another application domain is infrastructure construction which could include foundations, slabs, bridges, pylons, etc. And finally extraterrestrial construction, that is, building on Moon and Mars for planetary exploration, exploitation, habitation and colonization is another major field of use of CC Corp technology in which the company technologies have excelled to receive high recognition by various space programs in various countries.
Management
Contour Crafting Corporation (CC Corp) is an early stage company with the mission to commercialize disruptive construction technologies, starting with Contour Crafting® (CC), CC Corp’s flagship technology. CC Corp was founded by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis (www.bkhoshnevis.com), who is the President and CEO of CC Corp and is the Louise L. Dunn Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California. Dr. Khoshnevis is recognized worldwide as the pioneering inventor of construction scale 3D printing who has so far received over 100 US and international patents in the field. In 2014 Contour Crafting® was selected to receive Grand Prize by NASA among 1000+ globally competing technologies, and was earlier named as one of “25 Best Inventions of the Year” by National Inventor’s Hall of Fame and History Channel’s Modern Marvels Program. CC Corp’s other large-scale 3D printing technology called Selective Separation Shaping received another NASA international competition Grand Prize in 2016.
Dr. Behrokh "Berok" Khoshnevis, President and CEO
CC Corp was established in partnership with a major European multinational construction technology company to commercialize Contour Crafting® and other large scale 3D printing technologies. Numerous patents by Dr. Khoshnevis have been licensed to CC Corp by the University of Southern California and a significant number of additional patent applications are independently in progress at CC Corp.
CC Corp’s technologies use specially designed robotic systems to quickly construct buildings using data from 3D CAD designs. While there are numerous applications for these technologies, CC Corp is initially focusing its efforts on transforming and revolutionizing building construction.
The Company’s business plan is to initially leverage the CC technology to support building of low-cost and emergency housing projects in various areas of the world, including in developing countries. This plan will soon be extended to construct larger average size residential and commercial buildings. The company’s business strategy entails Technology Deployment Agreements with a highly selective number of strategic partners, These partnerships could also be in form of joint ventures. CC Corp has developed a multi-phase business plan for the design and development of commercial grade and saleable automated construction machines.
Advisory Board
Andreas Saar is a Senior Advisor for the Additive Manufacturing Industry supporting companies and startups developing, verifying and refining their technology directions and roadmaps as well overall market strategies. He retired as V.P of Manufacturing Engineering Solutions from Siemens Digital Industry in 2021.
Andreas is a senior Manufacturing Engineering expert with over 35 years of experience in Discrete Manufacturing Industry, managing organizations with international, world-wide distribution, specializing in the area of CAD/CAM/PLM software. Responsible for the strategic product direction, portfolio planning, development and exploitation of products and solutions.
Andreas J. Saar, Senior Advisor
Andreas holds a Masters Degree in mechanical engineering and Business Administration (Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Ing) from the Technical University of Darmstadt/Germany. After working as managing director of a small CAD/CAM software company in Germany responsible for R&D and Operations he relocated with his family to California at the end of the nineties to take over the lead of the software development teams for all manufacturing applications in Unigraphics Solutions, later Siemens PLM. In 2014 he started and spearheaded the Additive Manufacturing Program initiative for Siemens Digital Industries Software with an aggressive plan to develop a full end-to-end solution for Additive Manufacturing Software based on partnerships with leading hardware and software technology providers in the AM Industry.
Throughout his career he has worked with large enterprises as well as small and mid-size manufacturing companies with the goal of helping them become more productive. He helped to optimize their processes through the development and adaptation of highly innovative technologies in the fields of subtractive and additive manufacturing. During this time, he was also involved and participated in multiple European and American research projects as well as being on the BOD for research centers like CCAM (Commonwealth Center of Advanced Manufacturing) in Virginia.
In 2019 Andreas was nominated to the Board of Directors of Evolve Additive Technologies, a US based Startup developing industrial printing technologies for mass production of polymer parts. In 2022 he joined Contour Crafting Corp in El Segundo, CA as Senior Advisor.
Professor Soibelman obtained his BS and MS Degrees from the Civil Engineering Department of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He worked in the construction industry for 10 years as a chief engineer of a geotechnical engineering company, as a developer and construction manager, and as an owner and president of an engineering company before moving in 1993 to the US where he obtained in 1998 his PhD in Civil Engineering Systems from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In 1998 he started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. In 2004 he moved as an Associate Professor to the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in 2008 was promoted to Professor. In January 2012 he joined the University of Southern California as the Chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In June 2021 he stepped down as the Astani Department Chair.
Dr. Lucio Soibelman, Senior Advisor
During the last 25 years he focused his research on advanced data acquisition, management, visualization, and mining for construction and operations of advanced infrastructure systems. He published over 200 books, books chapters, journal papers, conference articles, and reports and performed research with funding from NSF (NSF career award and several other NSF grants), NASA, DOE, US Army, NIST, IBM, Bosch, IDOT, RedZone Robotics among many others funding agencies. He is the former chief editor of the American Society of Civil Engineers Computing in Civil Engineering Journal. In 2010 he received the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering Award, in 2012 received the 2011 FIATECH Outstanding Researcher Celebration of Engineering & Technology Innovation, or CETI, Award, in 2016 he received the ASCE Richard R. Torrens Award, in 2017 he received the ASCE Construction Institute Construction Management award, in 2013 he was elected an ASCE fellow, in 2016 he was appointed as Viterbi Dean Professor at USC and was appointed as a Distinguished 1,000 talent Professor at Tsinghua University, in 2019 was elected to the National Academy of Construction, and in 2020 he was appointed as the Fred Champion Estate Chair in Engineering Professor at USC, in 2021 was elected as an ASCE Distinguished Member, and in 2022 received the ASCE Peurifoy Construction Research Award.
His areas of interest are: Use of information technology for economic development, information technology support for construction management, process integration during the development of large-scale engineering systems, information logistics, artificial intelligence, data mining, knowledge discovery, image reasoning, text mining, machine learning, advanced infrastructure systems, sensors, streaming data, construction robotics, and Multi-reasoning Mechanisms.