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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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".

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Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc.

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.

Just wait for electrobot 2000 and the problem is resolved :)

> Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car.

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.

For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom.

In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming the complete panel to be attached to the car.

In short, if we ever see a major change to automate housing construction I expect it will also come along with significant changes in construction methods.

In many ways this is what much of prefab is. Building is carried out offsite by robots, and humans just assemble panels onsite. However, this reduces the adaptability of the building, increases transport and storage costs and complexity, and creates new issues (apparently prefabs can be at higher risk of fire).

Construction is one of those things where the process is much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes would suggest.

Have you seen the concrete 3D printers? They printed weird looking houses with them. Very nifty. There are even people living in them.

Yes I have seen concrete 3D printers. Does it also print rebar into the concrete?

The change is already there, prefab build techniques lead to construction companies keeping everything in-house - from crane operators to plumbers. The building is split into parts that can be built in-house and then assembled on-site - the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible, since that makes you more independent of weather for finishing it. Especially for warehouses and facotries it's really impressive.

It's the difference between trying to take the factory to the site and just taking the parts to the site.

Also, as far as I understand, 3D-printing concrete does not give you any way to construct larger buildings, where you need pretensioned and reinforced parts...

> the aim is to have the structure with a roof on it as quickly as possible

Couldn't you just build a tent-like scaffolding for this purpose? Maybe one that can be extended as the internal build progresses?

You would need to build a tent like scaffolding that you can still work in, e.g. with a crane. That would be a non-trivial thing to design, put up and maintain, especially if it has to withstand stroms without damaging the building etc.

It is simpler to just put the house there quickly.

In my country houses are build in factories and then assembled on site. You rarely build a single house you build an entire neighbourhood in one go.

You rarely get to build a new neighbourhood here, often it's renovation work done on already built areas. Building a whole new block all the time is simply unsustainable.

This is a great way to build out when your city is growing like mad. I think China and Russia have seen and still see a lot of development like this.

Eventually you end up with a dense city when you need to upgrade or replace a building in a constrained environment (think NYC or London or Tokyo), you have very different limitations and technology.

Are the factories mobile and/or relocatable to reduce transport costs; and/or are the neighbourhood location requirements somewhat specific (e.g. flat stable land, good road access etc)?

After WWII there was a big boom in houses made that way in the United States too but then homebuilders were able to get legislation passed so that "a small manufactured house is disfavored because it’s mobile like a vehicle but it is also required by law to be mobile like a vehicle" and the problem for them went away.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trailer-regulation

Very interesting read, we're facing similar regulatory capture issues here in my country.

And outside it can be sunny, rainy or even snowing, sometimes even on the same day.

take a look at the seers catalog houses of the 30s

Yeah, my point wasn't really well stated, I think that was why it generated discussion.

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.

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