Fastbrick Robotics is a company in Perth, Australia, that has created a brick-laying robot called the Hadrian, and they claim it can build the foundation of a house in two days.
Hadrian can cut to size, mortar and place 1,000 bricks per hour, which is 20 times faster than what the average human bricklayer can do. Previously, 3D printers were extruding castles from concrete. The Hadrian makes building complete modern homes from bricks possible at a rate of about 150 homes a year, provided the telescopic boom doesn’t tip over.
The giant robot arm finds where to position itself from a fixed marker that’s feeding information from a 3D CAD representation of the house. It auto-corrects itself 1,000 times per second to prevent interference from vibrations or sway. There are apparently also lasers to triangulate position, and it all sounds very complicated.
The advantages, one would think, are that a robot construction worker can operate 24 hours a day, regardless of weather or union breaks. What a joy it will be to live next to a robot construction site and literally never be able to get any sleep!
“The Hadrian reduces the overall construction time of a standard home by approximately six weeks,” Fastbrick Robotics CEO Mike Pivac told Gizmag. “Due to the high level of accuracy we achieve, most other components like kitchens and bathrooms and roof trusses can be manufactured in parallel and simply fitted as soon as the bricklaying is completed.”
In case you’re suddenly worried about robots taking all our good construction and coffee-making jobs, it’s believed the Hadrian will not only reduce waste and emissions (it’s supposedly electric), but will actually create jobs. In Australia, bricklaying has apparently become a passé career path, with most master craftsmen being older than 50 and nearing retirement. The addition of robotics to the job, the inventors hope, will bring younger apprentices to job sites.
You can check out a theoretical working of the Hadrian below in this animation: