As someone who follows construction technology, and someone who just happens to be from Perth, this is great to see. There are a number of "brick placing" robots starting to pop-up, most however seem to be a little... lets say "delicate" for the battleground that is a construction site. (I'm thinking the "Flight assisted Architecture" video, using swarms of drones to place lightweight blocks, and a modified car factory arm on treads, which I unfortunately can't find the link for right now.)
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 pretty sure everything on that is hydraulically or electrically driven - switching the diesel running the hydraulic pump out for an electric motor is probably simple... I suspect the most difficult part of that would be the software to manage having it drag around a 3 phase esxension lead safely...
Wouldn't it be easier to automate building using something other than brick? Probably bricklaying started because bricks were small enough a person could carry and lay them individually (now they are ornamental of course rather than strictly functional). With a machine there isn't the weight/size restraint of a human laborer.
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.
I don't know about in your country, but in the UK there was a period after the second world war when Brutalist architecture was in vogue with town planners.
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.
Indeed. The UK had all-concrete "prefab" houses made of reinforced concrete slabs joined together. They had two critical problems: firstly, if water gets into the reinforcement it rots from the inside out and cannot be fixed without demolishing the house. This can make them impossible to mortgage and insure. Secondly, due to single skin they leak heat very badly. Some have been retrofitted with brick second skins for this reason.
There's a book by Stewart Brand called "How Buildings Learn", which goes into the importance of changes made after the initial construction, and how much they contribute to making buildings humane. What I took from it is: buildings are like anything, we can't just imagine them in abstract and have them turn out perfectly. Reality is messy, people are complex; there are a hundred things you can't imagine up front that need to be attended to before a building really meets the needs of its inhabitants.
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.
I suspect he was referring to non-concrete prefabs.
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.
They did take some time to build obviously, but that was probably made on a assembly band or similar where they make one of those sections every minute.
And if they put some nice automation systems in the shop they could probably cut that time down significantly.
If the article is correct, that the robot is parked in a single location and reaches across the building site to place bricks, then it can only be used for unreinforced masonry structures. Perfectly reasonable in West Australia, but not a great idea in places that get earthquakes.
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.
Bricklaying is a semi-skilled job, it's not just a matter of placing bricks on top of each other. You need to have a perfect mix of cement and the corner pieces need to be custom fit, usually by breaking full blocks down to side with a lump hammer. All of this detail is glossed over so as usual I'm hesitant about saying that this is much more than a pick and place robot.
This seems like the missing link to the concept of 3D printing large structures. Printing concrete in layers from the slab up to make walls seemed like it was jumping the gun a little. This seems entirely more reasonable - the finished structure will look more uniform and be made quicker as the primary material is formed offsite and delivered in bulk, ready to use.
Dunno it feels like they invented the steam horse; laying briks after briks seems grossly inefficient when one could drop entire wall sections at once, especially if they start building them with self connecting piping
Brick construction is still a major selling point for homes in Perth (especially double-brick [1]).
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.
haha yeah - very cool - (maybe this has already been done) but I always thought it would be cool if 1000 people printed as many parts as they could, paid to send them somewhere to be built - and have kind of a habitat for humanity style situation.... but yeah living in a 3d printed house is probably pretty terrible(y dangerous) right now.
Is it like this for other cities? Strange random world-class inventions popping up out of the suburbs with no warning.
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.
Its a little egocentric to expect a metropolitan area of 2 million to not be able to invent something. The world economy isn't on hold because one location is doing well.
God no, Perth people are incredibly inventive and creative, it's not that we don't expect people to invent things here (and if my first post sounded like that then I got the tone totally wrong).
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 ;)
I think what you're witnessing is the Perth "blow-hard" effect, wherein the culture has a proclivity towards hype and hubris if it thinks something is "world-changing", because Perth is an underdog city in the context of Australia, an underdog country. Perth culture promotes the idea that its citizens are bound by destiny to have a big impact on the world, since its literally a city on the edge of the world, very far from most of the major civilizing actions, and very isolated from most of what is going on. So it "has to be" a very progressive, "forward-thinking" place. Whenever someone in Perth invents something neat, its a "world-changing thing, invented here in humble Perth" .. usually turning out to be exactly the opposite.
Your assessment is unfair. I'm not from Perth and have no vested interest in defending it.
The article is typical journalism. Perth blows no more smoke than anywhere else. The only place in Australia that could be accused of the arrogance you talk of is Victoria (nicknamed "France 2nd" for a good reason).
Perth now isn't exactly a shining example of journalism. It's one of the lowest quality publications in Australia. Adelaide's advertiser is probably the worst. ABC News or The Australian probably the best.
nah, there are genuinely world-changing people here.
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 think what Marcus is referring to is that the "startup community" in Perth may not have heard of this prior to the whole world hearing about it. Given what a significant and huge undertaking this project is I can understand his surprise.
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.
Also realize that innovating/startups are seen differently in different cultures and even 30 years has changed the landscape dramatically in the US as far as big opportunities for people who can do more than just inherit money really really well and/or climb the ladder at huge corporations. Being able to make your own equipment/3d printing is and will continue to be a game changer.
Another interesting piece of automation: I tried to find a video of the robot in action, but a search for Hadrian bricklayer on youtube only found videos that played a text-to-speech summary of the article and a slideshow of pictures.
In the image it's putting in 'bricks' the size of cinderblocks; basically clay-based cinderblocks (not sure what the English term for them is). The reason people build with two layers is for thermal insulation. It gives the house mass, and you can leave a gap between the inner and outer bricks in which you can put insulation, so that with 30-35cm in total, you can build a passive house (can be heated with just locally produced energy), even when it's -20 outside.
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...)
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.