Brick-laying robot can lay 1000 bricks per hour

[phantom power]

As robots get smarter, cheaper and more versatile, they're taking on a growing number of challenges – and bricklaying can now be added to the list. Engineers in Perth, Australia, have created a fully working house-building machine that can create the brick framework of a property in just two days, working about 20 times faster than a human bricklayer.

Named Hadrian (after Hadrian's Wall in the UK), the robot has a top laying speed of 1,000 bricks per hour, which works out as the equivalent of about 150 homes a year. Of course there's no need for the machine to sleep, eat or take tea breaks either, giving it another advantage over manual laborers.

At the heart of Hadrian is a 28 m (92 ft) articulated telescopic boom. Though mounted on an excavator in the photo below, the finished version will sit on a truck, allowing it easier movement from place to place. The robot brick-layer uses information fed from a 3D CAD representation of the home for brick placement, with mortar or adhesive delivered under pressure to the head of the boom.

http://www.gizmag.com/hadrian-brick-laying-robot-fastbrick/38239/

[Bucky]

1. is this a union robot or a sell-out scab robot?

[panader0]

2. I put in over 40 years as a bricklayer

and now this.....
(over two million bricks and blocks later)

[1939]

6. In those forty years

you must have seen and lamented the serious decline in craftsmanship in bricklaying/masonry.

[panader0]

10. Seriously

The older buildings in nearby Bisbee have beautiful craftsmanship. (turn of the century) Most of the buildings I worked on
were plain commercial or residential structures. I put hundreds of fireplaces in those houses.
Every once in a while I'll get a custom job where the owner is willing to spend more.
More elaborate is more fun.

[cwydro]

13. I have a weird obsession with bricks lol.

I pick them up everywhere I see them. I've made numerous walkways etc in places that I lived, but I've got no real training.

I'd love to learn how to actually make walls using mortar etc.

[Nye Bevan]

3. It's all good until the robot imprisons its own creator

by building a 100 foot circular brick wall around him to trap and starve him.

[zazen]

5. LOL! n/t

[IDemo]

15. A Trumpbot?

Oh, wait. We already have those..

[lpbk2713]

4. Does Hadrian have its own security detail?

Making sure it doesn't have any "accidents" must add to the cost.

[DetlefK]

7. "And rather than taking human jobs, he hopes Hadrian creates them."

This is a robotic slave. An unpaid robotic worker. Because of this unpaid worker, you no longer have to hire a paid worker. People will choose the unpaid worker over the paid worker and paid workers will be less and less in demand.

What kinds of jobs will that robot create?
There are jobs to operate those robots and program and maintain them, but those jobs are already taken.
This robot just replaced 20 jobs with 1 job. What are the 19+ jobs supposed to be, that the robot will create?

This robot has marginally lowered the costs of building a house and drastically lowered the time to build a house. So, will everybody start building houses now? Will there be a housing-boom?
Ask Spain and China whether building more and more buildings is a viable economic model.

[phantom power]

9. I see this as a net loss in jobs for humans.

It will put more human bricklayers out of work than it creates in new kinds of work for humans, probably by a wide margin.

[hatrack]

14. How could anyone be stupid enough to harbor that particular "hope"?

I mean, seriously,

[packman]

8. A 3D house printer will make that brick-laying robot obselete

in a few years - progress.

Yes, people will be thrown out of jobs if this catches on. That was my concern also. But master brick layers still will be needed and demand more for their work. Also, just as solar, wind and gas energy is displacing coal and oil related jobs , there will be a need for new skills, new talent which can ask for better wages because of their knowledge.

Just down from the road from me a house recently installed solar panels over the roof and put a few in the yard. The manufacturing, science, workmanship and all related jobs in the building and installing of those panels must have been considerable.

That's a nice site, interesting stuff.

[OxQQme]

16. 3D printer

[packman]

17. Fuckin' amazing

Reminded me of something near my old home town:

"Cement City Historic District is a historic district in Donora, Pennsylvania. The district includes 80 Prairie School concrete residences built in 1916-17. The homes served as housing for employees of the American Steel and Wire Company. Poured-in-place concrete houses had become popular in large-scale housing developments at the time, partly thanks to promotion by Thomas Edison; the homes built in Donora used a newly patented construction method from the Lambie Concrete House Corporation. Building the houses required a combined 10,000 barrels of Portland cement.[3]"






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_City_Historic_District

[NCjack]

11. As more jobs disappear, the next construction invention will

be the "straw house" throw-up robot. DIY with the rented robot.

[DUbeornot2be]

12. Anyone else...

...think they ought to ship this beauty up to a certain wildlife refuge in Oregon?

[dembotoz]

18. have to admit this is pretty damn cool

would love to see it work

[Matariki]

19. Some day we'll have a 'leisure' society where people are focused on creativity and learning

while the robots take care of menial work. Resources will be distributed fairly of course, it's the only way this will work. The arts will flourish. Scholarship will flourish. We'll create a utopia.

[hunter]

20. Anyone not living in dire circumstances can live a life of art and scholarship today.

My parents are artists and scholars. Work was something they did to support their art and their children. My dad had union work most years and achieved a comfortable retirement. He and my mom now live in a rain forest as full time artists, drinking and bathing in the water that falls on their roof, buying food at the local farmers market.

There's something else holding us humans back, not resources or technology.

I think the people running the show want to control great armies of slaves and wage slaves, and they allow poverty as a means of instilling fear in the rest of the population.

You see the same themes among the smaller tyrants and would-be tyrants, although their means are often far more brutal on the face of it; from the chaos in Syria, to the Mexican drug cartels.

I think what we now call "economic productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

[csziggy]

21. They claim it is the first brick laying robot - but what about SAM?

This kind of robot could lead to advanced construction such as this:

Or be adapted to ICF buildings:

My house is made from ICF and it is a very tight building shell with fantastic insulating values. Stacking the blocks for the first floor took three days and pouring the concrete into the ICG took one morning.

[BlueJazz]

22. Great. Maybe the Robots can buy all those houses.

[mb999]

23. what's going to happen when most jobs can be done by robots?

Capitalism is not going to work.