Perth engineer invents robotic bricklayer
perthnow.com.au
perthnow.com.au
Retrofitting this onto an existing crawler chassis makes this more practical. The major issues I see in implementation are unfortunately legislative. Most suburban/residential construction sites -considering these are the most likely to utilize it - have quite strict noise restrictions. A diesel engine running 24/7 is going to upset a few neighbors.
Also, from a Health and Safety perspective. Residential construction is very fractured when it comes to trades, and at the best of times, difficult to coordinate. I would imagine either a physical exclusion zone, or a temporal one while this thing is operating since it appears to be semi-autonomous, making it difficult to have others on site around it and maintain safety.
All things I'm sure the inventor has considered over development, but challenges none the less.
I'm looking at some new townhouses being built and they start at 7am and I think the noise by-laws say 8am so yeah, who cares about the neighbours? :P
I worked one summer on a concrete crew building tip up slab buildings... big structures like a Costco or trucking depot. How it worked was the foundation was poured, then the forms for the walls (one or two walls at a time) were placed on top of the foundation. A spray to prevent the concrete wall from bonding the the floor was applied, and the wall was poured directly on top of the floor and then tilted up by a crane. Then the next wall was poured on top of the floor and the process repeated. The whole system seemed much more efficient then laying blocks and a building shell could be assembled very quickly.
While a cool invention, this robot bricklayer seems something like a computerized horse carriage. It seems a paradigm shift is in order to really automate building. Poured in place concrete may be a more efficient method for automation.
Poured in place concrete may be a more efficient
method for automation.
While it produces occasional gems, a lot of the structures and towns rebuilt in this style are unpopular.
I think you'd have a much easier time selling houses that look just like normal houses, rather than selling revolutionary all-concrete houses no matter how efficient they may be to build.
In that light his argument for bricks vs concrete is that bricks are very easy and low-tech to adjust after the fact. Concrete is amazingly resistant to change.
Having said that, maybe we just need another set of robots for sawing up set concrete, but I'd call that a harder problem than printing it in the first place, and perhaps bricks still have a role to play in the interim.
btw for some reason people like bricks, think they look good. So i think there is a market for it.
This is what you are looking for i would say, it is a robot that 3D prints houses with concrete. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SObzNdyRTBs
Personally i think the fastest way of building robust houses that look good without tons of human after work is with prebuilt segments.
I have literally seen a concrete base on a yard on my way to work in the morning and an actual house walking back home in the evening.
I love a cool robot as much as the next guy, but a lot of these "building of the future" technologies act like they've won the race after the first lap. Prefab houses don't just give you the basic structure, they give you a finished house, with flooring, cabinetry, wallpaper, plumbing, electric... it's like the difference between a 3d printer that can print some of its rigid components and one that can print its servos and control circuits.
And if they put some nice automation systems in the shop they could probably cut that time down significantly.
I wonder how much modification it would need to be able to build brick cladding around a timber frame structure.
When I was working for a builder we would show up on-site after the foundation pad had set, and unload pre-nailed frames and trusses from a truck. Stand up and fasten the frames, top-plate and roof trusses. Usually we would put the ceiling battens in at this stage. Another contractor would put the roof on, then we would paper (or tyvek etc) the outside of the house, and install the windows and doors. The soffit under the eaves would go in. Then the brick layers would clad the outside at more or less the same time the plumbers and electricians were doing the pre-wire/pre-plumb.
With the eaves already in place, even a mobile robot is going to have trouble placing the top several rows of bricks.
On the other hand it should be possible to change the build order, in which case the only major change to the brick placing head would be an additional mechanism to install the anchors that attach the bricks to the wooden frame.
This confirms the “machine” is static in one corner of the building site, so it seems limited to non-reinforced builds.
Though it might be possible to interleave it with manual labour to lay and anchor the rebars.
Also reminds me of the brick paving machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLDP6s5FPCk
I've seen pre-fabricated homes in mining towns up North, where labour costs are insanely high. While they look nice (and structurally sound), people still prefer the traditional house constructions.
We've got a thriving startup ecosystem that seems to be getting known around town and yet we still get people appearing on the front page of HN that we've never heard of.
It's just that in a town where everyone knows everyone, we'd expect to hear about awesome stuff like this happening locally before it hits HN ;)
(Disclaimer: Sandgroper.)
I think it's more that finally, because of the internets, people can genuinely change the world from Perth. They always had to move East or North before. Now we actually have people here making a global impact we get astonished by it, and very very proud :)
I've decided to read the local news more often, so by chance I did come across this the other day.In general I suspect there are many more world class projects coming out of the unis, research institutes, mining engineering firms and just smart people working away within their own circle of interest. Many of which will never be heard from either within the startup community or general public.
;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Swan_emblems_and_popular... (for those who don't get the joke)
Not sure if this is because of labor, or cost or materials or some other reason.
They should extend this machine to also lay cinderblock.
I don't know if it can lay bricks this close to an existing wall, but if it can't already, that seems to me to be the main issue for adopting this thing in Europe. I wonder how much it would save on the total cost of a house though. Let's say labor for laying bricks on a 'normal' sized (200m2) house in Europe costs 6000 euros (40m2 per facade, times 4, plus twice 40 for the interior walls, times 25 euros per square meter excl vat). How much would this machine cost to rent - 500 euros a day? (a big crane costs that, including operator). You still need an extra man to supervise, stack bricks etc; total cost per day is 1000 euros. Let's say it can actually build it in 3 days, including delivery, cleaning etc. I doubt 3 days is feasible, because the cement can't set that fast. But let's say 3 days. Then you need to count another 1000 (at least) for the CAD engineer to prepare the plans. Seems like minimal gains overall. Probably starts to make sense for large projects only, but not many of those use much brick (but maybe they don't because it's too expensive...)