Robot Bricklayers

What do you all think of this? Potentially lower the cost of building once it's established?


http://news.domain.com.au/domain/re...uild-a-house-in-two-days-20150714-giaw96.html

 

Puts a new spin on 'bricks and mortar' being a good investment.

 

I have seen the actual machine up close. It's an amazing bit of kit

 

One brick every 3.6 seconds seems quite slow for a robot though unless this already includes stoppages due to other building work.

 

Wow crazy. Feel bad for tradies if this goes off

 

That's 8000 bricks in an eight hour day. No lunch breaks, no tools-down.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-...-almost-40pc-of-jobs-redundant-report/6548560

It’s the way of the world. How many blacksmiths, water carters, draftsmen or even checkout chicks do you see these days?


Yes, plenty of jobs will be made redundant, but it’s a fact that most jobs that exist today wouldn’t have existed a couple of generations ago. Mine certainly wouldn’t have.

 

Impressive, at least the machine won't put out a newspaper on a potentially rainy day waiting for the rain drops to fall so it can call time off and down tools.

 

You ain't seen nothing yet.

3D printed houses are already here: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2014-04/25/c_133290171.htm

 

a bricklaying machine that can work 24 hours a day but is throttled to work between 7 and 7 by council regs.

would probably still be an extra 6 hours a day, though....

i struggle to understand it's capability to do anything other than a square house on a bigger block.

where do you put that crane on an 8m wide lot? or a 5m wide lot?

how does it make room for itself on a 450sqm apartment site? a typical scaff crane only needs a 0.6m square pad.

imagine the wear and tear on those clips as the bricks move over the boom - i see a cage needed or a decent chunk of public liability insurance.

 

You will still need a Bricklayer for the harder parts straight line span walls no problem with a machine like this ,but with all the WPHS these days and safe work times ,this may fool people but if you have a building background then you would think different..

 

It will need someone to hold it's bong too

 

I think we look at this through different glasses. I agree that this isn’t a product that’s ready for the market right now.

But everything you listed are issues that can be overcome. This proof of concept (along with the one that Steve posted) shows that houses of the future will likely be built by robots, not people.


I would be surprised if in ten years’ time it wouldn’t be cheaper, faster and more precise to use robots rather than humans for this kind of work.

 

perhaps this will drop the cost of housing...

 

i simply can't see it - in any case.

I'm all for innovation, simplicity, time saving etc - this is not simple, has huge maintenance / setup / entry barrier costs and well as simply the noise and fumes of running a massive diesel engine on site all day, every day to power the hydraulics.

i see one company taking this on, going broke, and it never being spoken of again.

just like everything else in Australia.

 

Either way it still can't lay bricks in the rain. It won't work with single and double storey dwellings because where is that big machine going to setup. We get told to hurry up and move when we have a crane in the driveway for an hour. Job sites are tight enough as it is.

 

I hope this topic is still online in 5, 10 years.

 

They’re all engineering problems and as an engineer, I’m confident that they can be overcome.


I agree that Australia isn’t all that good at producing things like this, but look at the concrete robots, they’re already made in China. So all that an Australian company has to do is to start importing machinery like this once they’ve become established overseas.

 

Except bricks aren't/shouldn't be the future of housing - I'm still waiting for more prefab, SIP, etc. to really take off here. Now those should change the face and cost of housing... I'll just go back to my Grand Designs episodes from 2001 and know we'll get there in about 5-10 years.

 

precisely.

a machine that stacks rocks isn't exactly revolutionary tech.

framing works fine, very easy to engineer your own SIP walling system if not.