Where are the robotic bricklayers?
constructionphysics.substack.com
constructionphysics.substack.com
If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans.
This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. You're not reducing labor costs by much, because you still need humans around. And workers lose control over their job, and have to "work around" the robot's limitations. Instead of being freed up to do more work, they become babysitters of machines that they have to oversee so it doesn't mess up everything.
This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of your work, or it's building the entire house.
The response from users (operators, engineers, customers) is overwhelmingly positive. Quality of parts increases, quantity of parts increases, cost of operations decrease, quality of life seems to increase for all involved. My mantra is "People are bad at being robots. Robots are bad at being people."
Just yesterday, I worked on a cell that's automated the placing of small seals in a plastic assembly. For the past 8 years, for 12 shifts per week, there's been a person sitting at a dial table that indexes every 2.5 seconds. They were responsible for placing a tiny part in a magazine with a buffer of about 20 parts, a really fast operator could work ahead and have 30 seconds to stand up and shake their wrists out or take a drink, and then sit back down to place parts. Now, a robot pours the seals out and picks them up automatically; there's still an operator around monitoring stuff like the amount of talc powder on the seals, the quantity of parts in all the hoppers, running pressure tests every couple thousand parts, adjusting speeds and pressures of the multitude of actuators, and generally optimizing the cell. They can use their human analytical and decision-making work because they're not tied down clumsily using their fingers to grab a seal every 2.5 seconds; the robot does that mechanical function without complaint. The robot cannot refill hoppers, it cannot sense when new parts are contaminated with moisture that won't feed through the machine, or when a nipper is getting dull; outfitting it with sensors and algorithms to attempt those more complex processes would not be a productive endeavor.
People use tools because tools are useful. Scope and adjustability are critical; when a tool takes over the entire process and gets in the way, that's a bad thing, but a good tool is far better than no tool at all.
In the context of automation, the "robotic revolution" has already happened between the 4 industrial revolutions - basically, robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots. The majority of manufacturing and processing is already hyper optimized to only needing a few overseers to make sure the machines are running smoothly.
When talking about the automation revolution, I think it's important to make the distinction between robotic tooling and autonomous robotic systems, even though they evolve from each other. The difference is when humans interface and at what abstraction humans can operate it on. Generally, tooling is constrained to an individual's output. Robotic augmentation is in it's own category as well (human activities being enhanced by machinery).
Tooling is extremely useful, still has a lot of future potential and I don't mean to undermine work on new tooling. Just - usually when we look at robots, especially with the buzz around deep learning, we set the bar for problem solving at the level of autonomous construction because we assume, sometimes incorrectly, that optimizing our current tooling yields little efficiency benefits relative to the former.
Doing the physical labor is difficult. My father was a bricklayer from ten to fifty, when he finally had to stop working. But he loved showing me the buildings he built. He helped build city government buildings, schools, libraries. The pride he felt, that he’d built something with his hands that would outlast him, kept him going.
We don’t need to solve just for the physical actions, but also for the human experience of building and the feeling of mastery. Particularly for physical trades.
Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again.
I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
Yes, very much. That's how a lot of trends and styles move "down market." The new consumers want teh appearance of what they see as wealthy/elite/etc. But they frequently dont understand, appreciate, or recognise, what actually goes in to the goods they're trying to copy. You'll see this everywhere from houses to clothes.
Sure. Now put the build cost of the mcmansion of say $200k (plus land), vs your hand crafted mansion at $500k (plus land), and see what people really want.
In my country cookie cutter housing goes back over 100 years. The massive post-ww2 housing boom had the same design of houses springing up across the country, it allowed slum clearence and gave people cheap housing.
The main housing problem in the UK is the land cost/availability rather than construction cost thanks to every house not being bespoke. When land is allowed to be built on, half a dozen standard styles are dropped down on an estate of 500 new houses over a few years (dribbling out at the right level to maximise sale price and maintain the illusion of high demand low supply), but that was the same in the 00s, and the 80s, and even before then.
Now sure you can craft your own bespoke house with lovely hand-crafted artisinal features, but you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for it, and most people just want somewhere to live.
No way you could automate that kind of ingenuity. So, props to your dad, and there are more people like him still doing this work today.
I think people care more than ever how their house looks, and that is exactly why they buy "ugly McMansions".
I mean why else would you buy a McMansion, other than for the look. From a construction point, most aren't built to last. From an architecture point they aren't great "machines for living in". From an economic point they're neither frugal or a great investment.
Bottom line is the main reason people by a McMansion is because they care more than anything how their house look, and whether you or I like it they really want a house that looks like a McMansion.
Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000.
When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time.
The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training?
A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match.
The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory.
I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that.
There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.
Sorry it's really hard to get a sense of the difference you're describing and I'm really interested to see what it looks like.
Carving the undercut by hand is pretty time consuming (i.e. unprofitable). But I have access to a CNC router. I laid out a template in FreeCad, and cut it out. Using template bushings and an edge fluting bit with the bearing boss ground off, I can cut the pulls with the undercut in a couple minutes each. And they come out more regular than doing them by hand.
I'll admit that I'm not much of a carver, but I don't think I could get the time per pull down anywhere near that while maintaining the same consistency even with a lot of practice.
I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and attribute it to a lack of case by case application human ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman brings to the trade.
Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.
Why? At the end of the day there'll be two companies offering to build your wall. Human vs Tech-assisted Human (and eventually, robot). If one is faster, more accurate and cheaper, the buyer will choose it. The other will go out of business.
It's not about masons embracing this, it's about clients embracing superior outcomes (quality, price and/or time). Eventually the few masons that make the switch to superior outcomes will push the others out of the market.
That is of course assuming tech-assisted/robot will actually be better. At the moment it's not in the vast majority of cases. But granting that assumption, I don't think 'satisfying the human experience of a mason' will go into the equation for long.
That's not a value judgement, I think building good human experiences is important. I just don't think in the decision making process it'll matter due to inevitable competition.
And I bet there are plenty of folks that would rather babysit this machine than babysit the machine at the fast food place.
The cool thing about bricks and rock is that those walls will probably be there 100 years from now.
This is like complaining that cars did away with the pleasures of horsemanship, or how laser printers have destroyed the pride engravers derived from their work.
The history of technology is full of taking hard tasks that people took years to master and therefore derived status and self respect from, and replacing them with machines. People cope.
We generally do not structure our economic activity for maximum enjoyment on the part of the worker, but for lowest price and best quality to the consumer. To the extent that this translates into catering to the worker, it's by way of the increased efficiency allowing higher wages (though, as recent US experience shows, companies can also grab all the productivity gains for themselves).
I think I understand your overall point, but what you said isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process" essentially a partial robotic system?
Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's essentially one big chain of robotics with human overseers. There aren't that many exceptions to car manufacturing once the set car variants are establish (LX, CX, blah blah model variants). I would consider that whole system a "partial robotic system".
Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.
But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
Robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots, we call them washing machines and dishwashers and factory lines. There's a blurred line in between machines that do stuff and robots.
In discussing the automation revolution, I like to think the difference is robots functioning autonomously (sorry dishwasher, you're not included). While there is still a lot left to do in speeding up repeatable processes, building robots that can run themselves with higher abstract operational input ("build a brick wall") is where the revolution is at.
Robotic tooling plays a huge role in this, unsurprisingly - robots need to do everything humans can do. But... we mostly build human interfaces, not robot interfaces - switches instead of electrical signals, handles instead of joints, etc.
This is for good reason; mass produced robots can't do basic movement, precise placement, etc. (well, not at cost). So robots are extremely limited to being bolted in factories or otherwise constrained environments. But when robots can start to do generalized tasks, I'd be interested in seeing exactly what kinds of autonomous stuff robots will start to do.
We automated looking after the house after it's been built, no need for people scrubbing floors and clothes any more, freed up 40% of the workforce.
My partially automated vacuum cleaner, clothes washer, dish washer, food cooker, water heater, all work well.
And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in the article is more popular with construction labourers than any of these robots.
Also just want to add that working in a physical job for 50 years is much better for your body than sitting at a desk for 50 years.
The experience of my neighbors from an industrial city is 100 per cent opposite. Physical jobs tend to consist of endless repetitive tasks that put a huge strain on certain joints and sinews while leaving other parts of your body idle. And many physical jobs will expose you to health risks such as breathing dust.
All the miners, steel workers, construction workers etc. I knew had major problems with their joints around 35 years of age and none of them could continue to work in their original job after 50.
On the other hand, negative effects of sedentary work can be mostly compensated by not eating processed crap (to prevent obesity) and exercising moderately three or four times a week. Plenty of people do that.
I think you’re envisioning jobs with high skill requirements or low demand, or a mix of both. Like landscaper for the town, or garbage truck operator.
Otherwise you’ll generally be met with a combination of RSI, hazardous product ingestion (dust, paint fumes, exhaust…), allergies, injuries, or sheer overwork.
Working a low wage low level physical job is more often than not closer to Amazon warehouse worker than artisans healthily exercising their bodies.
This is a pipe dream of white collar who never did any actual, real, physical job for a very prolonged time. It's not like going to the gym for free or doing just the right amount of sport. It's something that stresses your joints and your muscles day in day out. Obviously you will partly get used to it and be "more fit" than a white collar but you will also develop back pain and joints pain.
Not for my carpet-fitting granddad. And it's not like he has a private pension. Desk job damage can mostly be undone by proper exercise: it takes surgery to fix knees.
Standing all day is also worse for your back than sitting all day. Even being a shop assistant is harder on your body, and particularly your back, than sitting at a desk. (Alternating, i.e. an office job with a sit/stand desk, is best.)
The primary issue is complete lack of inactivity (a large component just being weight gain), which you can combat by exercising outside of the office.
I get that everyone is going to say, "well then, UBI" but bear in mind in an automated society, power is disproportionately in the hands of the people who own the machines, and they're unlikely to part with their wealth voluntarily.
And did that actually improve everyone's quality of life? Or did it just increase the cost of positional goods (check out house prices in the West)?
Isn't the point that house prices are high because they've not been automated? And also that people expect to buy a house using a massive loan over decades.
Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might as well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper
Which is still automation.
Robots in factories making cars still leave most of the "decision making part of the job for humans".
See, the size of the "decision making part of the job" matters...
It's still automation (which, as a concept, doesn't require being able to do multiple jobs, or even to do a single job from start to completion).
A mechanical system that frees a human from having to do do part of a job is already automation, and can still save tons of time and worker costs/effort. E.g. a system that automatically assembles 95% of a car door, and a human just has to come in at the end and attach some hard to automate part, is still better than the human having to assemble to whole door.
You are wayyy underselling the importance of convenience tools. Even without working out edge cases you can reduce a workforce of 100 people to 95 robots and 5 supervisors/decision makers.
Sounds to me like this criticism could have been made of the dishwasher and washing machine, too. I suppose what matters is the ratio of edge cases to regular cases.
And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it.
This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".
The problem must be somewhere else: setup time is too long, too many constrains or whatever. It's not that the edge cases are not handled, it's that the main case is not handled well...
How often does that actually come up in modern construction? We don't really do brick buildings anymore. Bricks are generally only a façade, a decoration, rather than the structure of a building. They have to look great because that is now their job. They have to fit between other decorative features and adapt to curves and non-perfect angles. Previous edge cases are now a daily norm.
I say that the robot brick machine is already common. Those trucks that pump concrete into forms are the automated brick layers. This is an important point for all robotics. It is always very hard to build a robot that can directly replace a human. The way forward is to build a robot that gets the job done using different means. The human "dishwasher" was replaced by a machine that does the same basic task but via very different means. The concrete pumping robot now creates solid walls faster than any team could ever lay bricks.
I picture a lot of automated solutions focusing on the "in the field" part where the work is easy and rewarding, and glossing over the manual intervention and craftsmanship that is needed for all the nonstandard bits. I don't know about bricklaying though I imagine it has similar characteristics, where a square windowless wall goes very fast, and could be pleasant work, and all the time is spent dealing with windows and the frame not being level and other edge cases.
> You're not reducing labor costs by much
You could make the same argument wrt supermarket self checkout. They still need a worker to manage the machines. Yet you need fewer human workers overall, so productivity still increases per-worker at the right scale. Allow the tech to develop and they may become more viable.
arguing "you still need humans" seems to me to be a straw-man; there no rule that this is useless so long as humans are still involved - if productivity increases, that's enough.
> you're building a convenience tool
Which seems fine to me. Removing the majority of the "labour" part of the job removes the most unskilled part that humans are least appropriate for (repetitive uncreative/boring work) and freeing them up for the "hard/creative decisions" aspect that humans are better at.
> largely unpopular
> workers lose control over their job
This might be unpopular among workers; not sure, other worker might prefer it. At least, if this requires fewer workers to lay brick, either the demand is such that it can still meet worker supply, or workers suffer (from lower wages or unemployment).
But this is irrelevant - barring union influence, it's not the workers that get to decide. If the job is to "babysit machines" you either refuse the job, or you don't - so long as people take the job, they will grow.
There is still a bunch of work in construction that can happen while brick laying happens (plumbing and electrical installations in the floor, pillars to carry roof/next floor, ...) and there is usually a mandated licensed professional to oversee the construction (or few, one for safety, one for quality and ensuring the project is actually followed).
And you can also start doing things as parts of walls get completed (installing windows, insulation, more electrical installations). After the building is put under a roof, that's when the real work begins :), though that's even easier to parallelize.
Brick laying is literally one of the quickest parts and most effective parts of making a building look like a building, but it's nowhere near the most costly thing.
FWIW, the slower concrete dries, the stronger it gets. To the point where critical concrete buildings like bridges are kept moist for days or even weeks with hoses and wet blankets.
The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would probably need help refilling it.
That seems really stupid to think that the robot must be able to build the whole thing or it's useless.
Just have robots put up large, long, straight walls. Have a separate one for curves, or a special one that only handles corners etc...
Or have a robot that just preps the brick with correct amount mortar and hands the brick to the human for placement, maybe there is an aligning contraption (doesn't have to be a robot)...
In our interactions with robots, I feel the future valuable work will come from work where humans have the agency and direction, while robot’s functions have been specifically tailored to augment the specific human’s skills or relieve the human of certain repetitive parts of the process.
The first part describes programming perfectly.
Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.
However, plots and legal requirements differ significantly that in urban environments, it's hard to make the most of the plot without going custom (requirement to be that far away from the neighbour and the street, whether you can have windows facing that side or not, what kind of foundation is required by the terrain, etc).
(following sites are in Hungarian)
https://kulcsrakesz.hu/tipushazak/
Kind of like open source design of a house.
The key part is that, much like what humanity got from washing machines, automating some parts of the process is enough to have substantial savings in both cost and turnaround time, which also reflects in cost.
> If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing some of the labor part of the job, but still keeping the decision making part of the job for humans.
I'm not sure this "all or nothing" train of thought makes sense. Shipping containers were a terribly simple solution that covered only a very specific aspect of a logistic chain but it was enough to revolutionize international trade. Washing machines only focus on one specific task but they revolutionize economical and even social aspects of society. Heck, a crane only lifts weights up or down but it radically simplifies operations to the point of being indispensable.
Why should the value added by a brick-laying robot be any different?
Bricks are great for humans to build with, they are just the right size and weight for the human hand to manipulate and place. They are not optimised for machine manipulation.
I would guess that if you wanted to automate construction you would start by making things like walls on an automated production line, then ship the largest practical piece to the construction site. Once there I'm guessing some automated cranes could move them into location far more easily than thousands of slightly randomly sized pieces of hard clay.
Work out what problem you are trying to solve. Do you want cheap construction? then why choose a material that requires thousands of operations just to build a wall regardless of if it is a human or machine doing the building. There are far more efficient building materials used every day... Just see how fast commercial buildings can be constructed and you can be sure that they are optimised both for speed of construction as well as (hopefully) energy efficiency and ease of maintance after construction.
The problem seems to be people have a emotional idea of what a dream house is, an idea that is firmly stuck in the red brick house of 1970's sitcoms.
Whenever a wall is purely functional, it’s almost never made of small clay bricks today. I’m talking about foundation walls, subsurface retaining walls, and similar things. The types of walls that aren’t meant to be looked at, but instead meant to hold something back or up.
Whenever you see a wall being made of red clay bricks, that’s because the builder wants it to look nice. I suppose you can cast a concrete wall and apply a façade of bricks. But there’s still a skill required for that final step.
Of course, you may have a different design aesthetic, wherein exposed concrete or large modular sections are both functional and pretty. But brick laying is all about looks.
CMUs are a different story, and kind of prove your point. They’re much larger and so reduce the piecework involved, but still small enough to allow for onsite flexibility in construction.
For old homes that get renovated, it's popular to keep the old brick facade standing, demolish everything behind it, then build it up again.
It's rarely functional.
Although there are still a lot of old (mostly built between 1400 - 1950) brick buildings that get maintained with proper masonry, all of which is functional.
which were likely robotically brick-laid
I expect that this is less a case of "bricks have long been used because they’re pleasant to look at", and more a case of "Bricks are considered pleasant to look at, because they have long been used, and have that old-timey feeling"
* On a laminate wooden desk, in a room with laminate wooden floor (The same logic - neither are real wood, just an old-timey construction).
* Wearing a knitted jumper (which again could be considered stylish from an old-timey perspective, as the manufacturing could have used less thin cotton, but thick cotton is supposed to make it look hand woven)
* In a office which has LED lights hanging down which are designed to look like exposed old lightbulbs (same logic)
* While typing email on my laptop (the logo to which is an envelope, arguably to remind you of the old-timey mail system).
Heck, even my headphones have some fake leather on them, which is effectively just a fake material just to look like older materials which are actually less soft, and my coat has some fluff that is designed to make it look like coats used to look like when they were made from animal fur (even though, now, that is considered abhorrent, fake fur is still a thing, everyone just knows it's simulating the old material for whatever reason, because that was the old style).
So I think design trends in general come from historic use-cases in the context.
The article links to the MULE product (which was an evolution or pivot of their 15yr attempt at making a traditional bricklaying robot) makes more sense as it takes advantage of the lifting power of machines and uses much larger/longer bricks that would otherwise be too heavy to pick up by humans while accelerating the process.
https://www.construction-robotics.com/
This is much like why pigeonholing AI into traditional cars is more difficult than say having a fleet of cars region wide which all talk to each other and coordinate movements with roads and crosswalks that are also designed for automated cars.
There is a scene in Penny Dreadful (Which is set in a fictionalized Victorian London) where a character laments all the brick buildings that are being built, replacing wood buildings that have "character", because wood "holds its history" unlike bricks which are all the same, forever.
The main appeal of bricks is essentially nostalgic, similar to the appeal of low resolution 8-bit graphics. We call one 'traditional' and the other 'retro' but those labels are arbitrary.
The article mentions cinder blocks ("CMU") -- those are not typically pleasant to look at. Even the ones that are less unpleasant are usually covered, with sidings or paint.
I’ve seen stores with moulded facades designed to look like bricks that are attached to reinforced concrete.
Doing it "properly" means building proper moulding, rebar, vibration casting all the stuff that sounds like almost impossible to automate with 2021 technology.
Bricks have the advantage that they're pre-cured, so you don't have to wait ages until the wall actually supports something — and if that something is just the next layer.
To be honest, as a kiwi I was the same when the first moved to the UK "why are they building NEW buildings out of brick???" It's because there's so much clay here, the materials to make bricks are abundant and this is similar in other parts of Europe.
Brick is also more resilient to the weather here, if they build hosues with wood like NZ (or America) they'd degrade incredibly quickly.
Just have concrete poured or stick frame and a fake brick facade. Will probably last longer as well.
Seems like the wrong problem to solve.
They are structural (in terms of compression, but have low tensile strength which is probably why they aren't popular in North America)
They have a good R-value
They are easy to work with
We are building a house right now, and the cheapest, quickest and easiest part so far has been building the walls. We are using clay blocks[0] which are R-10. Compared to other tasks no specialised equipment is needed, it's literally just manual labour. When you get to a corner or window, they can easily be cut with an angle grinder or even by hand (for a rougher finish). The house is two floors and the exterior walls for each floor took less than a week to build. It's quicker (building forms takes a long time), cheaper, better insulating and better for the environment than monolithic concrete.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__T8PWnntkU - Not this exact product, but this was the best explanation I could find in English.
out of curiosity, why do the blocks need to be different in North America?
Brick houses also hold their value well.
No one cares about a brick facade.
Also why do you say bricks aren't structural? I assumed those 100 year old brick houses used bricks for structural support.
A single layer brick wall isn't structural.
Basically, "thermal blocks", which is mostly what's used in construction in areas where they are used (Europe, rather than filled-in bricks) need to be modified to accommodate imperfections: you need half bricks, third-bricks, and they are easy to make on the spot.
For automated construction, you'd have to have a bunch of these pre-made, and the larger the block you are building with, the more types of those smaller ones you'll need.
These blocks are also relatively simple to put electrical and plumbing installations in (it's a lot more demanding to make "channels" in concrete than bricks).
Anyway, block construction is way cheaper than eg. gypsum board construction for interior walls in Serbia, and other than taking a lot more space, being heavier, and requiring curing time, it has a bunch of better properties (acoustic, thermal,...). The price not being high is actually the reason this is not further improved.
Filled-in bricks are mostly used for decoration of outside walls these days (and usually as plasterboards these days), and as far as paying for things go, humans will happily pay the most for good looks!
Well, eventually roads will also be optimised for self-driving cars not human drivers. But until then, self-driving car have to interoperate with the existing, pervasive, legacy infrastructure, even if it isn't optimal for their needs.
When you get into fancy high dollar construction in HCOL areas where time costs more money that's when you get bigger blocks that need machines to move them or you get formed and poured structures.
Your fully automated house-extrusion company isn't going to have many customers, especially after you explain to people why their ideal dream home is obsolete and that they should pay you for a plascrete tube to live in instead because the profit margins are better.
Those "emotional ideas" are what drive market incentives, you can't simply ignore them.
It’s weird to focus on the upper end of the market for a thing like this. If the utility in automated construction is to reduce costs, it might make more sense to consider the more price-conscious portion of the market. I.e. starter homes and the like. My guess is that since there are so many other large costs involve in home construction, automating this one component just doesn’t make a significant price impact in almost any market segment.
There is _a lot_ that goes into laying a brick wall. From excavation, base compaction, material choice, mortar composition and viscosity, wall type, overlap patterns, leveling, overhang patterns, set time, and much more. Using an incorrect overhang pattern for instance can allow water drops to fall and contact the relatively soft surface of bricks and destroy them in a few years. Having an incomplete mortar seal allows the elements to penetrate through what would normally be waterproof, especially in places with high wind. An improper excavation, compaction material or compaction of said material, improper leveling, and many more factors will lead to failure within just a few years.
The best way to learn about this stuff is to go try it! One could volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or a local shelter that builds homes and get some time with the tools. None of this stuff is simple, straightforward, or easy, and there are a million ways to do it incorrectly.
If you think the bulk of the actual laying of bricks, siding of a wall or shingling of a roof isn't a simple task you've never worked a construction job.
Thinking is required around corners, windows and other interruptions. The bulk of the material laid, hung or otherwise expended is done so in a simple and repetitive manner. Once you've figured out your non-standard bits of the job you basically just run on autopilot.
That said, I agree that 99% of the the engineers who try and design this stuff never actually have the requisite experience to understand the nuance of what's going on.
The thing is, designing a machine may be really complex, but it only has to be done once. After that, the machine will repeat the process with extreme precision. A machine can position bricks within microns and mix mortar to the milligram, doing things level and with the correct overhang is jokingly easy for a machine.
What machines are not good at is dealing with variation they can't control. Bricks are not perfectly sized, mortar behaves in unpredictable ways, the ground is not flat, not even solid. We humans have no problem with that, and anyone can do a wall shaped construction, but the machine, with its microns and milligrams may fail catastrophically at the smallest bump.
I also heartily second volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. It's rewarding work, fun if you're with a good crew, and a great way to learn new skills.
Months later, I have only seen one (probably the same one they demoed in front of my house). It was clearly defective. The crew was using it to dump the asphalt, and they were tamping it down manually.
Sounds like it did its job - it got some positive publicity for the people that bought it and manufactured it, and the fact that it doesn't actually work is a problem left with taxpayers and town employees.
In other words, the problem was that the machine worked perfectly, and would have resulted in a bunch of union job losses.
Hence, it was "no good" and had to go.
if we do such low level comments then let me speculate it was not the union at fault but the developers, they used node.js and 1000 buggy and bad coded libraries.
Tropes about one guy working and four supervising or tearing up recent work just to fix something you didn't fix while you were at it don't persist because the industry is a shining beacon of economic efficiency, they persist because they're universal enough to be relatable.
Usually it's done with wood but there are also factories that build prefab houses with bricks.
Edit: Here's a second video [1] where they use concrete. It says that factory can makes enough for 60 houses per year. It also says, at the end, that it's not cheaper but faster and "easier on the nerves" for the builders.
If you can engineer out some of the potential delays that can take a huge amount off the overall cost.
This sounds like a problem with the process and contracts, not something that cries for a technological solution.
Also prefab houses have a lead time of about 6 month.
But once the on site build has started it's fast and those elements come with electrics, water piping and (sometimes) windows preinstalled. They just need to be connected.
You basically have the choice between the classic building methods with an architect and contractors, or an All-in-One Firm that has it's own contractors and almost always uses the prefab model. The later also is way less hassle for the once-in-a-lifetime home builder, usually.
Asphalt paving requires 4 guys to level the asphalt but a truck to pour it. The best you can get is an attachment on the truck to level the asphalt. This attachment is called a paving machine. And it requires an operator and two-man crew to maintain. So no real advantage besides workers won’t be tired. And the leveling will be done super well.
Other automation problems are similar. If there is no need for precision, there is no need for automation.
Still, a lot simpler than laying bricks, which is why it's already there :D
Banking curves is a real thing and you notice when someone got it wrong.
Paving a road is a small step compared to building the roadbed; but its what people see. It's probably better to think of that like painting a house, building the road is a much bigger thing, but then it gets the surface refreshed often enough you see that.
Replace those bricklayers with a robot and its caretakers and now you need:
1. Someone with technical training who can keep the bot running happily. Since the technology is new and changing, the available supply of trained people is necessarily low and therefore wages for them would be high.
2. Drivers to get the bot to the worksite. If they stay, they are doing essentially nothing when they could be laying bricks. At that point, the robot is saving you basically nothing. Or they go off and drive for other jobs, but now the logistics of coordinating multiple work sites get harder.
You could argue that robot bricklayers are better for the workers' health. But contractors don't pay health benefits and don't care about that externality at all.
If a contractor gets one of these bots, now they are obliged to maintain it and keep it busy to amortize out the expense of buying it. That puts them in a precarious position of maintainence prices change, the bot company goes out of business, or work dries up.
Meanwhile, labor (until COVID) has been getting cheaper as the gains of the labor movement have been steadily eroded.
It is absolutely no surprise to me that we're still paying people to build brick walls, even without accounting for the fact that bricklaying is a pretty skilled activity.
Though it would be interesting to see what the state of construction is like in developed countries that don't have access to a vast pool of cheap immigrant labor. Maybe New Zealand? Northern Europe?
The corrolary to this, if you are a tech nerd who wants to see more automation is: If you want more automation, work to reduce poverty. Support unions, high wages, and other systems that give people the freedom to say no to shitty jobs that robots could do.
I'm just outside of Pittsburgh and, I guess I can't say conclusively, but the vast majority of landscapers, construction workers, and other outdoor laborers appear to come from the general local population. It's not like what I hear about California / Texas where hispanic immigrants are disproportionately represented.
This quote is my take away -
"Almost every advancement in construction is small enough for a man to carry"
"Industrialized Building In the Soviet Union" (1969) - "Panels and slabs average 5 tons up to a maximum of 10 tons. Transportation is considered within economic limits if factory to job site is no more than 150 kilometres"
Which is what the original article says on pre-fab -
"Because of transportation costs, they are all limited to selling within a few hundred miles of their factory."
They were also considered disposable in the USSR, and no one wants to live in them. Also talked about in the article, it's a good article give it a read.
My parents added a bedroom to a stick framed house. The floor joists took a weekend. Nailing together and erecting walls took one weekend. Framing the roof, another weekend. That was my dad, mom, brother and I. And we used a skill saw, hammers and nails.
I think the issue is each task of itself is fairly optimized. Yet there are a large number of them to do. And a problem is automation generally requires tight tight tolerances or you're back to hand fitting everything. For instance with molding a skilled tradesman will just install it without any detailed plans. Working around any small variation won't slow him down at all.
Another issue I see is lot of focus on single family. Gut feeling is mass produced single family is a dying industry in the west.
There is a lot of multifamily being built despite fairly intense NIMBYism. And despite that you're seeing cities getting rid of R1 zoning.
Anyway. I better quiet down. I'm sure the robotic bricklayers will be here to take our jobs soon enough. No need to rush it.
(Well actually, laying bricks is one of those fiendishly complicated problems at scale...)
Current low hanging fruit is long, straight walls. So a few customers will bite, using the human masons (who are paid more) as the high quality, judgement based service. The easy sections will be done by the machine.
Over time the machine maker uses their foothold to encroach on the more juicy work. As they collect data some ML will creep in and solve some of the harder brick laying issues. Maybe it will figure out about the mortar too.
Eventually the machine will be doing the whole job, and you can use an app to build yourself a heart-shaped wall just for fun.
Or perhaps there's just no economic incentive, and more inexperienced masons will do the easy bits for the foreseeable.
Wire camera example: https://youtu.be/j0K3XUqZI9w?t=187
This kind of reminds me of auto manufacturing. It's almost unintuitive how difficult, expensive & error prone paneling is. Also painting. Stamping out panels, painting and installing them is a very hard job to do with robotics. Most of the space, treasure and expertise invested into an auto factory is panel related. The "possible, but perpetually difficult" space can be a deep valley for robotics, it seems.
...And bricklaying, while conspicuous and important, is still just one job in construction.
My understanding is that bricklaying is a bottleneck. You can do things before bricklaying, and things after, but not really at the same time.
Last year they've started installing "Giga Presses" - the largest high-pressure die casting machines in the world, in order to reduce parts and increase automaton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press#Tesla
\ bricks are all the same shape and density
\ bricks have flat sides
\ mortar batches are mixed to the same consistency
\ a batch of mortar has the same consistency over time
\ bricks are laid in a climate controlled environment without changes in sunlight, precipitation, or humidity
\ mortar solidifies immediately and bricks do not move once laid
…I’m stretching* it a bit, but you get the point. The linked article gets to these points* towards the end, too.
We don’t have robot brickies for the same reason we don’t have robot chefs. Kitchens are all different and a general purpose cooking robot can’t adapt the same way a human can to either a dynamic environment or dynamic raw materials. Robots win when you change the playing field: cake factories producing one thing in bulk in an environment designed from the ground up for machines. Robobricky will happily churn out 6x4 prefab panels in a factory, but it’s much harder to make that process portable enough to bring to a building site.
*Puns not intended: stretchers are lengthways bricks and pointing is the process of smoothing the mortar in rhe gaps.
Simplifying a complex problem to look like an easily solvable problem is something that businesses and engineers are really, really good at. It's one of the reasons we leave people behind at the margins all the time, and it's one of the reasons that a thousand failed brick laying robots will be built.
For example, is it possible to have LEGO like slot fitted bricks, with cavities in slots filled with mortar?
Alternatively, toothed bricks that can be slotted, such that the top brick slots into two lower bricks.
But it would make the "hard" part of laying bricks (on wall connections which might not be right angle, when you only need 1/5th of a brick to reach the wall/window/door opening...) even harder. Basically, you'd move the mortar laying complexity into "where and how do we join the joints".
Basically, how many non-right angles did you make with regular Lego bricks? And how many types of Lego bricks did you need to get that nice figure built out? :)
Here is a great video (and a great channel generally) on the subject: https://youtu.be/MRipzKkeQik
Bricks aren't very suitable for automatization and 3D printing seems to be quite a lot more promising, even though the current early forms look clumsy.
Printing a wall gives you an ability to leave precisely calculated empty spaces for plumbing, cables, electrical sockets and whatever we are going to need in the future. This is valuable, speeds up the construction process and reduces total dust.
- The hard part is the mortar
- Any useful number of brick lays will require after placement adjustment to maintain level/true alignment
- Those adjustments are where a good deal of 'skill' comes in
- Finishing / jointing is even harder
So it looks like this is an RL problem and the focus of the research needs to be geared toward the above. Basically you need a system to understand mortar and how to place various shapes of objects in it so that over time you achieve the goal of a specific wall shape.
This problem suggests an arm-farm like setup. Normally I always urge sim-first, but I'm not aware of any useful simulator that can do non-Newtonian fluids and robotic systems well. (either sure, but both? Let me know if you know of one.)
As for contemptuous automation, consider that it frees up humans to do more emotionally, mentally, or physically challenging work. We do need to provide for those immediately displaced by automation though, since despite economists' wishes, humans don't instantly retrain and self-allocate to new jobs and industries.
In the post-scarcity world that I hope we are working toward, people will have more time to pursue their interests, which may include hobbyist bricklaying, while machines labor to make living safe, affordable, and pleasant.
It's not that existing jobs will always be automated, we'll come up with tools that completely automate several layers of work.
It's a different view than all current jobs will be automated. Automation can be used to remove several verticals and improve efficiency by magnitudes in the process.
People are very good at bricklaying, and are paid a reasonable rate by the hour. No one has made a machine that can beat that feature set.
edit: more great features of human brickies that robots are terrible at: very small working volume; very small and agile footprint; safe for other humans to work near; half-day built-in power supply.
It's brand new, give it a minute.
The problems with new building tech are twofold:
First of all, for most people a house is the biggest investment they'll ever make, so they're not really keen to gamble. Oh, they'll make minor gambles - but a complete new way of building houses is a tough sell.
Second of all, building a house involves so many different costs that even a big saving in one area is only a drop in the ocean on the total project cost. If I'm building a brick-and-block house, the total cost of materials and labour might be $180,000 with brickwork comprising 10% of that. That's nothing to be sniffed at - but no matter how great and cheap your brickwork replacement is, someone taking a risk and using your new tech can't possible save more than 10%.
I can walk down my street in Northern New England and see brick buildings that are over 100 years old in a harsh climate, and that were reasonably affordable when they were built. The shapes and contours are usable and attractive to most people. They are able to be remodeled and repaired using very basic technology.
There are reasons that Dymaxion Homes weren't popular.
The only problem is they seem to attract tornados.
If I was building construction robots, I don't think I'd be aiming to replace skilled human crafstmen directly, but rather render them unecessary. Most likely that would mean robots in factories churning out standardised components that somehow let you build strong, aesthetic walls without bricks.
I've seen brick effects that get applied to flat walls, which seems like one solution to this if you want the look but not the expense.
His report basically said that anything you want a robot to do, no matter how difficult or dangerous, you can get a human to do for a few dollars more than they would charge for safe, easy work.
In trying to create machines that have anything close to the capabilities of a human being, you're competing with billions of people, many of whom are desperate for work. You're also competing with millions of years of evolution.
Then again, when they reach a critical capability level, I suspect robots will suddenly be everywhere and doing tons of things we don't like to do. But it's very binary, and until you can really compete with human beings effectively, there's basically no market for it.
It's only a matter of time. A building is planned, the step-by-step orchestration is QA'ed by a qualified engineer, and a set of robots go to work to build a whole building. Construction jobs will be phased out.
Also, in the movie Runaway - which actually predicted police areal drones as well, almost 30 years ago (but the concept of a drone did not exist yet, so it was called a "floater").
There's a surplus of cheap labor in the world, so it doesn't make financial sense to bear the upfront costs.
The problem is simply fricking hard. Bricks need to be split into pieces (half-bricks, third-bricks etc) to accommodate windows, doors and edges. Due to real-world plot plans, there will be plenty of non-right angles. And yes, there's laying mortar which is an art form :D
The problem with all of those (less the exoskeleton) seem to be a poor grasp of the challenges involved in doing the job. They all seem to assume a perfect environment; something rare (impossible?) for most on-site work.
I'm expecting something like a cement truck with a long arm and a multiple pass deposition process. Possibly foaming the concrete at the nozzle; if anyone ever gets that chemistry to work. It might well be called "manually operated", I'd anticipate someone at the controls at all times even if it can do some sections by itself, just for safety and "shit happens".
I'd also anticipate at least one person at the nozzle at almost all times, dealing with inclusions and inspecting etc.
Even this won't be cheaper or faster than current techniques, but the onsite foamed concrete extrusion might become popular enough to endure for insulation, looks, or other reasons.
There simply is no need for robotic bricklayers as there was no need for robotic horse feeding. Instead humanity invented cars.
We did not come up with mechanical horses, did we? We came up with automobiles.
Let the robots build houses in their own radically different ways: for example, 3D printing on site. Or anything else, really.
Don't let's just get obsessed with bricks in particular.
TRILLIONS of bricks through the ages.
I'm equally surprised that I have (not that I recall) seen a brick building being laid IRL.
Its just a very intricate process, a messy material and probably a manual job for a long time.
https://www.ijser.org/researchpaper/Rapid-Affordable-Mass-Ho...
https://publications.iitm.ac.in/publication/mass-housing-usi...
And what about adding mortar (or glue) after lego-like bricks have been added on top of each other?
Without looking closely at the economics, my impression is that brick work is expensive, but if you want it cheaper, you can get siding installed.
Frank Bardacke in his book, _Trampling out the Vintage_ describes the great skill that agriculture workers bring to the job that they do, from knowing whether something is ripe enough to pick to the dexterity required to pick it without destroying the fragile fruit or vegetable. Some jobs have been automated, but many more have not and most likely never will be.
Please, learn some humility and try to understand the skills that every human possesses and that they bring to their work.
And it's not just blue collar workers that are a target of this idea. We are already starting to see automated programming moving out of the research lab and into the commercial realm, e.g. GitHub copilot.
What are we if we aren't trying to move forward--solve problems, invent, and improve lives? A few weeks back I came across Hadrian, one of the machines profiled in this piece. The idea of building with higher accuracy, lower cost, greater speed, all while allowing people doing backbreaking labor to do something else, excited me. There was no contempt for anyone.
I like woodworking. I'm currently thinking of purchasing an industrial-grade CNC router. I think it's analogous to robotic bricklayers in many ways. I have to design a piece before I make it whether I cut it with a hand saw, use a table saw, or have the CNC router do it. The reason I use a table saw instead of a hand saw is the same for using a CNC router instead of a table saw--it's faster and provides me with a more consistent and accurate outcome.
If that's not a good enough justification, you should look into how much skill is required to operate a CNC router. You can use different bits, rpms of the router, speed the machine is moving at, entry speeds, depth of cuts, etc. There is a lot of skill involved. And when a lot of that is taken away so I can focus on what matters most--creating beautiful furniture--I'll be so very happy and won't feel the least bit bad about it.
I really disagree that almost anyone who has built tool assistance into someone's workflow will view their workflow as simple and view the employee with contempt - actually getting to know the BS they have to put up with on a daily basis actually deepens my appreciation for what they're doing. Sure I can cherry-pick examples that make folks look bad - employees today, even millennials, are for some reason allergic to learning keyboard shortcuts and will use right-click to paste. That's somewhat on them, but more on the company for not providing training time to teach better data entry habits.
If one of these highly skilled agricultural workers was given a robot that used scent to determine which fruit trees likely had ripe fruit that needed to be harvested - I'm sure they'd appreciate it for what it is, a tool that lets them concentrate on more important things. And, if we as a society are moving into a era where automation becomes so widespread that jobs are much fewer and far between 1) we'll waste a lot more time building freemium games or whatever BS labour sink society comes up with next and 2) we should realize that taxes need to go way up on the people still employed and UBI or other social services are needed to keep us functional as a society. Having too much productivity is such an easy problem to solve - you just don't do what America is doing and let it all coagulate into the pockets of a few hundred billionaires... and then everyone gets to live a good life.
If construction costs are cheaper than ever (are they really?) why can't I buy a box to live in without spending $300,000?
Why is the permits process nationally broken? And despite being skilled, that doesn't mean they're informed: why do contractors not know what they're supposed to do? Why do the people handing out permits not know what they're doing?
See also: trying to renovate or buy a home in Arizona.
Watching those people on youtube who make tutorial videos that go super fast and make it look really easy... You can record yourself writing a python script and make it look easy. Those people are pros, and have skills and experience to back it up. It isn't easy.
Can you think of any other reasons that people might believe something like automated driving is right around the corner?
Or is "contempt for the skill and intelligence of ordinary people" the only reason one might believe this?
Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented computers).
A lot of work in the real world entails some decision-making component that can be expressed in terms of symbol manipulation. This overlaps with the part that many people find difficult, because people are naturally good at physically manipulating the real world. So when we talk about automating driving or picking tomatoes or bricklaying, we are only accounting for the difficulty of automating the symbol-manipulation abstraction of that task.
(This is basically the conceit of "Manna", a science fiction story where a ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.)
If you're measuring the skills of manual workers against the standard of how hard it is to build a robot that replaces them, they are surprisingly hard. The same is true for the skills of trained animals. Maybe we should start worrying about replacing human beings with robots after we've managed to figure out how to replace dogs with robots. Once we have enough bomb-sniffing robots, drug-sniffing robots, livestock guardian robots, police pursuit robots, search and rescue robots, and so forth, to the point where we don't need dogs, then maybe we can start to worry about the human jobs. (Or maybe not--dogs have a really good sense of smell that might be harder to replicate than some human capacities.)
Yeah, we pretty much have... it just hasn't been widely adopted yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjztvddhZmI
And honestly, from a business perspective, most people really don't care about the skills ordinary people have.
Look at the wine industry for example. Top shelf wine is hand-picked, for exactly the reasons you outline, and some people are willing to pay top dollar for that end product.
But the vast majority of grapes are harvested by very simple machines, because scale and profit, and most people just want a $10 bottle of decent-ish wine.
We absolutely can automate cooking a fucking hamburger, and as soon as it's cheaper than the cheapest labour, McDonald's, Burger King, etc, WILL automate cooking a fucking hamburger.
Will it be as good as a "hand made" burger? Maybe.. maybe not?
Will the people paying a few bucks for a burger care? Nope.
This isn't an issue with "computer people"... this is an issue with economics.
Also, if you speak with people in ML/AI, they will not tell you it's around the corner. They know that physical stuff and robotics in general is hard.
Also, builders and the like often have a great amount of contempt towards any desk job - is that OK? Why?
Jobs that require interaction with the physical world and people will almost always be a hard to automate thing. There are simply too many variables.
The real problem is when we make the results of a job worse to aid in automation. The prime example here is tomatoes being breed with thick skin, picked before ripened, and then squirted with some chemicals to make them red so people will buy them. All while sacrificing taste.
One can absolutely admire the skill of a bricklayer, while celebrating the eventual fact that bricklayers will not be forced to perform that labor if they don't want to. Those are not mutually exclusive things.
"We haven't automated driving"
One can, today, fly to Phoenix Arizona, download the Waymo app, and summon a self-driving vehicle. Although it would be disingenuous to claim that self-driving is a completely solved problem for ALL use cases, it absolutely is "good enough" for very many of them, and will be scaled out faster than you expect.
"but many more have not and most likely never will be."
Unless there's some yet-to-be-discovered supernatural process at-work inside the human brain, this is just plain false. The human brain is an incredibly complicated machine, and nothing more. It's only a matter of time until we understand, or in the worst case, simulate it with sheer computational power.
Agreed. My mother was involved in my local city theatre, and always told us kids that "there would be no show without someone to lift the curtains." These people had their cameo in every finale. That has always stuck with me.
Ever wondered what would happen if there wasn't someone flipping burgers to satisfy your 2AM craving? You, no matter your riches or power or fame, would have to do it yourself.
The most innovative thing you could do is shut the fuck up and start listening. Instead of trying to replace the bricklayer with robotics, how about asking them how robotics could help them? They are the SMEs, they do a job considered easy to automate daily (and that job isn't easy to automate). They can tell you how they are wasting time on inefficiencies.
The job of technology is to allow the human to stop worrying about the rote. It is not to replace the human, or to solve imaginary problems. That's when problems arise: Facebook, racist/sexist AI, etc.
They miss that the contempt is not directed at those doing the work but instead directed at the skills-- this is evidenced by how they tend to trivialize the skills that are trying to be automated.
This is especially true when looking at the spectrum of quality of human work for a given field. Take, for example, masonry. There is simple bricklaying for the front of the house. Then there is intricate stonemasonry that requires a lot of careful planning, know-how, and knowledge of historical techniques.
There is machining a piece of metal in a simple way. Then there is intricate hand-finishing of that metal at the other extreme.
I suspect that over time we will see the less artisan, less "skillful" aspects of manual work be replaced but that fine craftsmanship won't really disappear. The more you learn about what goes into making certain things by hand the more you appreciate how foolish it is to claim that it can all be automated easily.
Automated cement-pouring in place of brick laying at https://www.nbc12.com/2021/06/24/virginias-first-3-d-printed...
The robots have arrived. Unskilled labour needs to be concerned.
I remember how people were amazed when robots like Asimo could not be used during the Fukushima disaster. Anyone who works in these fields, even peripherally, has a very different perspective of reality vs. fantasy and knew the score as it pertained to robots like Asimo, their actual utility and capabilities.
The most automated things have been designed by engineers with robotic assembly in mind.
I think I laid my first brick before the age of 9, but first just a couple here and there. Bricks are heavy! I think was 12 when I was given a straight stretch of the wall close to foundation to, and after review of my work I had to take everything apart, it was saggy, uneven and ugly. Eventually I learned to do straight walls, but the corners eluded me until at least a year doing it with very qualified masons coaching. I don't think my joints were ever pretty enough with that lovely groove that some people do, and avoiding mortar onto the brick is devilishly hard.
Where I live there is little brick construction but I love seeing what is there, it is always so pretty.
Based on my experience of the changing by the minute mortar, heavy bricks, continuous looping feedback, I don't believe it is something that will get automated.
Besides that It's not my experience at all that "computer people" think that these things will be automated in a short time frame. It's the opposite. The "computer people" are highly skeptic because they know much better then anyone what a computer is capable of. It's almost always the managers and marketing people parading automation around.
Things will become automated. That is the natural human progression. We are creative, and their are 7+ billion minds with new giants to stand on the shoulder of every day.
AI, soft/compliant robotics, and globalization are strong unrelenting factors/motivators.
The article suggests efforts go back over 100 years, so it seems bizarre to suggest this has something to do with "computer people".
There is a commercial burger cooking machine north of me in SF (https://www.creator.rest/), and there are similar machines for pizzas and other fast food. That isn't an unsolved problem.
There's folks on YouTube already who can automate the assembly of a hamburger using Lego. It's just slower than having a person do it in a semi automated manner.
Per the article, we have automated some of bricklaying (for roads), and I've definitely had ads show up for tools that reduce the skills needed to do bricklaying.
We've also automated parts of driving - staying the same speed, parking, etc. The automation all changes which skills are important, and steadily makes high skilled jobs into less skilled jobs.
Devil's advocate asks, what about the skill of the devs that can automate that kind of stuff? The types of things that might be learned in building articulating robotically controlled apendages to pick tomatoes without crushing them or the entire plants, the skill of a robot to cook the perfect burger to the perfect temp, etc. It would be impressive.
Sending people to the moon and building atomic weapons brought us some very cool and useful unintended things. So who knows what could come from some other boondoggle type of projects?
No. They just don’t know what makes it hard. I don’t know where the robot train drivers are. We’re doing cars and planes but it seems trains have fewer things to worry about. I don’t feel contempt for train drivers, the limitation is mine. I don’t understand. I still think I deserve to live.
I love this guy’s videos. He’s a fantastic insight into a world I barely know: https://youtu.be/qP1AmDRhoas
In order to make automation economically viable there would need to be a niche for "cheap" brick powered by automation. It's unclear to me that this niche exists and can't be similarly achieved by scaling up the blocks or switching to more labor efficient building materials.
Kind of an unfair generalization, I think. I see far more comments in defense of the skill of masonry and masons, insisting that automation may be too difficult, and almost none that "display contempt" as I see it. But I could be missing something. Would you be willing to expand on what you see here?
I wouldn’t know whether their claims hold water, but http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-har...:
A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per minute.
[…]
reducing the harvest costs by 50%
(The videos give me the impression that “10-12 tomatoes per minute” is best-case)
Where do you get that? While you focus on the "skill" and "intelligence", automation is about productivity and freedom (from labor)
> learn some humility and try to understand the skills
What do you think automation is, if not to try to understand the skills, then turn it into the program?
I'm confused - based on your Github profile I assume you'd fall under the category of "computer people". Are you saying you feel this way? Because I certainly don't.
What they have is edge case blindness
They literally don’t know what they don’t know
A good brick layer can do all the work in a few days.
It seems at least in homes, brick has become a luxury reserved for pizza ovens and fences in fancy suburbs. Given that, the automation doesn't really make sense. We already have a cheap commodity product, and nobody wants a luxury good than bogans can afford (not even bogans)
Nature has optimized the design of muscles and skeletons over tbe course of hundreds of millions of years. People tend not to appreciate just how good of an actuator muscle is. You can certainly beat it in power, speed, precision, duty cycle, or form factor, but not all at once. Bricks and blocks are specifically optimized for being handled by a human laborer: they are small enough that a human arm can precisely manipulate them but big enough that you don't need to place an absurd number of them. Anything that's optimized for human manipulation will be difficult for a robot to manipulate.
A typical block weighs about 35 lbs. A robot arm capable of even lifting a payload that heavy will cost you somewhere on the order of 80k not including end of arm tooling, weigh hundreds of pounds, and draw several kilowatts of electricity. Then you need to take this arm and put it on some platform capable of moving around a job site such that it can reach any place a human could. At scale, you're probably looking at a quarter million dollar machine just to get a brick near where it needs to go. Combined with maintenance costs, it's likely such a system would never pay for itself over its useful life. Maybe you could do a little better with bricks but 5 lbs is still a lot for a precision robot. All the artificial intelligence in the world is useless if the actuators just aren't up to the task.
For better or worse, human muscle is cheap, it can be leased with no money down, and you typically don't need to pay for maintenance. That it comes equipped with an extremely powerful computing system for no additional charge is just icing on the cake. People tend to have the mistaken belief that things which are conceptually simple must be easy to automate and that things which are hard to automate must be secretly complex, but that's not really it at all. Tasks appear simple to us because we are good at doing them, and they appear complicated when we're not. Picking ripe fruit seems like such a simple task to us because that is exactly what we evolved to do. Simulating quantum chemistry, not so much. Picking fruit isn't secretly more complicated than quantum chemistry, but it's much easier to automate the latter because it's not hard to be better than a human at a task humans perform poorly to begin with.
Matching the building technique and materials to what is automatable seems a better bet.