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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Just makes me think there's a market for a better brickie robot. The one they show is lethargic and built like a train. Even two robotic arms, working like a human does would be tons more efficient.

(I'd also like to complain about the stupid title, but it's what NYT picked)

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Why emulate a human at all? I think that's the main issue. There has to be a better way to lay brick once you get robots involved.

It's probably anticipating corners and arches, but for the majority of bricks this seems quite inefficient. Bricks could be rolling off a conveyor belt in to place.

Conveyor belt doesn't help, as you would still need an arm to take bricks from the pallet and place them on conveyor.

True. You could also have an unskilled laborer grab two bricks at once and place it on the machine at a rate of 1 brick every 2 seconds or so.

How about baking a ceramic wall (brick or similar) as a whole, perhaps layered like ply? Or at least much larger bricks? Seems bricks and brieze blocks are sized to be carried/laid by hand?

I'm wondering why they are using an arm with a gripper, etc. Quit emulating how a human would do it, and make a machine for laying bricks.

I'm thinking something like a robot with treads, that can move in a straight line (or maybe curves), perhaps at the end of a long boom with a conveyor on it that moves bricks from a central source.

It basically grabs a brick off the end, squirts some mortar down, and lays the brick. Make the bricks shaped in a special way so they interlock better and need less mortar at the edges (they already have bricks something like this; they almost look like lego). Then it rolls to the next brick position.

Once it gets to a certain point, it "crawls up" to the next level, perhaps by gripping the level below with the treads (the mortar will probably need to be some kind of "ultra-fast setting" stuff; possibly more like epoxy than mortar), and lays the next layer, being guided by the last.

I guess I'm just saying this particular brick laying robot looks like it was designed by an engineer who, back at the beginning of heavier-than-air flight, thought an airplane needed to flap its wings to get off the ground...

I imagine something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MKcTbYDP7w except for bricks

Imagine the smallest hexapod that could grab, carry and lay a single brick, then coordinate a huge swarm of them.

Or better yet: imagine the smallest walking/climbing platform that could carry a robotic arm just big enough to take a brick and pass it on, then coordinate many of them into semi-static bucket brigades for bricks and mortar that could form an ad-hoc power grid to solve the battery issue.

The main innovation tasks/requirements would be cheap volume production of the swarm elements and intelligent planner software to automatically derive a work plan straight from the CAD data (or else project setup/customization would be prohibitively expensive). The beauty would be scaling: need to build a bigger structure? Add swarm elements. Need to speed up the schedule? Add swarm elements.

yes that's the one. where do you live? let's create a startup.

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