Where are the robotic bricklayers?

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.

Since when do we account for people’s feelings when deciding to automate something or not?

My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these big timber structures to wrap handrails and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself) writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either. It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become permanently warped into a spiral.

Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again.

I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.

Reading about your father having such a long career in brick masonry sparked joy in me. Thanks for sharing

>Not destroying your body lifting heavy weights for 50 years seems like something people might like.

And that's why the exoskeleton system mentioned in passing in the article is more popular with construction labourers than any of these robots.

Most construction relies on fit young men to do the "heavy lifting". It would be interesting to see how the dynamics changesd if technology moved the needle on the brawn->brain scale, so that the core value prop of a construction worker was not their fitness. I'm not convinced it would be for the better.

Also just want to add that working in a physical job for 50 years is much better for your body than sitting at a desk for 50 years.

And sometimes the things that are automated were the only thing that was pleasant. It's not true for laying bricks because the heavy lifting makes it unpleasant.

Not just test! Real users need to be there from the requirements stage.

So bricklaying it’s basically an ‘artisanal’ type of product not a mass production type of thing that is ill suited for automation anyway.

The article links to the MULE product (which was an evolution or pivot of their 15yr attempt at making a traditional bricklaying robot) makes more sense as it takes advantage of the lifting power of machines and uses much larger/longer bricks that would otherwise be too heavy to pick up by humans while accelerating the process.

https://www.construction-robotics.com/

This is much like why pigeonholing AI into traditional cars is more difficult than say having a fleet of cars region wide which all talk to each other and coordinate movements with roads and crosswalks that are also designed for automated cars.

> But brick laying is all about looks.

I’ve seen stores with moulded facades designed to look like bricks that are attached to reinforced concrete.

Bricks can last a long time.

Brick houses also hold their value well.

No one cares about a brick facade.

Also why do you say bricks aren't structural? I assumed those 100 year old brick houses used bricks for structural support.

That seems like a large assumption.

That may be the case. I am not in a position to say.