
Western Australia’s Fastbrick robot building home in three days a ‘world-first’ - richardboegli
https://www.perthnow.com.au/business/construction/was-fastbrick-robot-building-home-in-three-days-a-world-first-ng-b881021385z
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hazz99
Real (non-CGI!) timelapse of the robot bricklayer:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YcrO8ONcfY)

It seems like a cool concept. The real example is slightly different to the
CGI mockup, so I think they still have a bit of work to do.

Best of luck to them! This could potentially bring down huge construction
costs. Keen to see more automation in the construction industry.

~~~
AstralStorm
And it will change little as long as the bottleneck is land and permits. And
that the profits on each units are to be maximized.

I also wonder about reliability of such houses - that remains to be seen.

~~~
hazz99
Disclaimer: I know nothing about construction.

I think it'd be great to have some sort of automation in place for the simple
& repetitive stuff (bricklaying), but it _feels_ like we're a long way off
from fully automated on-site house construction.

Possibly solved with prefabs?

> And that the profits on each units are to be maximized.

Wouldn't this benefit the construction company, since it brings costs down?
(i.e. wages, insurance etc

~~~
AstralStorm
Yes, it would, but it will not solve the actual problem of availability and
affordability.

The construction company has little incentive to drop costs by much.

As for prefabs, they are already widely used. What do you think those bricks
are, or the big chunks of concrete used for roofs? Or perhaps the components
used for balconies?

If you mean to make even more complex patterns, the trouble becomes
applicability. Not everyone wants to live in the exactly identical house and
most deployments have a quirk or few to adapt.

~~~
dzhiurgis
> Not everyone wants to live in the exactly identical house

Sure, what about when it costs 5-20x less?

At least in boat building you can either have:

A. Boat designed and built by someone random in a shed.

B. Boat mass produced by a company of hundreds of years of tradition and
knowledge.

With some rare exceptions, you'll always want the second option. The bugs have
been worked out, everything is ergonomic and safe. Easy to find parts even if
they are of inferior quality.

I really don't get why houses have such a special attention. It's the most
expensive possession people can have and they wanna build in a way that it's
even more expensive and prone to error. Imagine if everyone built their own
car...

~~~
mijamo
Construction costs are pretty low, it's the land that is expensive. Ao if you
reduce the construction cost by 70% it probably reduces the total cost by only
10/20%, and you get something generic instead of something made for you.

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metaphor
By this sample residential construction schedule for a 6,000 sq-ft custom
home[1], it looks like they've theoretically managed to cut a 9-day job down
to 3 without addressing the negotiation of foundation imperfections, plumbing,
electrical, rebar reinforcement, air gaps, structural arches, and random site
obstructions to name a few. Cool tech and surely a step in the right
direction, but if we're still talking about affordable (patented, proprietary
blocks?), sustainable (mortar substitute reliability?) housing that meets
code, color me unconvinced.

Heimo Scheuch, CEO of Wienerberger AG: _In times of digitalization, high
demand for affordable housing and the prevailing shortage of skilled workers,
the construction industry is facing major challenges._ [2]

Prevailing shortage of skilled construction workers??

[1]
[https://www.b4ubuild.com/resources/schedule/6kproj.shtml](https://www.b4ubuild.com/resources/schedule/6kproj.shtml)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qcyvoCtZB0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qcyvoCtZB0)

~~~
AstralStorm
There is no shortage of workers, but a shortage of workers who want to do
heavy physical labor for almost free and storage of training for free.

Nobody wants to actually invest in work.

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AmVess
Brick work and framing are two of the easiest and fastest steps in building a
house. They are using an expensive system to do the cheapest steps.
Essentially, they are answering a question no one asked.

The expensive and time consuming parts are everything else; something this
system does not address.

~~~
ahje
Actually, I think this may be a real time-saver for quick builds where you
need an extra building like a garage or extra storage space.

As others have pointed out there are some flaws in the wall in that article
and it might not be optimal for housing, but for quick and dirty jobs it will
most likely do fine. Construction as a service! :)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
The timber frame itself and the exterior cladding for a traditional garage is
extremely easy to build. Two relatively untrained guys with a stack of planks,
a mitre saw and a nail gun can build that even quicker than this robot. The
expensive and time consuming parts are the foundation work and the roof, which
this doesn't address at all.

~~~
barrow-rider
Also the utility work, no? Unless you're in a pre-planned subdivision or
demolishing existing builds (brownfield stuff), water, phone, and power are
often non-trivial.

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sien
Their system uses some custom adhesive as do some of the other systems around.

The catch is how will this adhesive hold up in 30 years and are you brave
enough to be that it works well on your house compared to the saving of using
conventional systems?

This is why innovation in building is slow.

Fail fast is not possible. And there are often side effects. Just ask people
with a metal framed house that creaks when it expands and contracts.

~~~
grecy
Australia has extremely strict building regulations, codes and inspections.
(My brother just built his own house there...)

I feel extremely confident this has been tested thoroughly, and it would not
be allowed if it has not passed all tests.

~~~
AstralStorm
The regulations do not handle reliability, only registration of detected
failures.

Most building methods that are not known to fail catastrophically are allowed.
(Including among others fires, water handling, short term structural collapse
and invalid administration as well as cheating on plan vs implementation.)

So it is mostly bureaucracy.

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dbetteridge
Perth on the frontpage of HN, womders will never cease...

Cool idea if it works though, especially for disaster events and rapid
construction

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ChuckMcM
So this is their video from 2 years ago :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bW1vuCgEaA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bW1vuCgEaA)
and they are a penny stock (3.5 cents to over 20 cents on the news). The video
on the web site doesn't work for me but I would be interested in seeing a
video of this thing building an actual house.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
There is a more interesting video if you look at their channel.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfK41aTB7_VI2DHTJy2l-yg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfK41aTB7_VI2DHTJy2l-yg)

But why would you want a robot like this? Why not prefab the parts of the
house and assemble on site?

~~~
jcims
Unfortunately that block wall it built looks quite sloppy if you really
inspect the interblock spacing and vertical alignment between layers. And
these are dry blocks with no mortar to let them slip and slide. Stand at the
corner of a a block wall built by pros and look down the plane of the wall.
You're going to see perfection. I do it any time the opportunity strikes and
amazed at the consistency.

No doubt a well supported robot with appropriate sensors and placement
techniques could exceed the accuracy of a human, but this doesn't appear to be
that robot quite yet.

~~~
ToFab123
They are using glue instead of motar. It is being added just when then brick
come out of the arm and then gravity is doing the rest.

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djrogers
No photos of the house, a broken video, and zero details on things like
roofing, plumbing, in-wall wiring, etc. Oh wait, it’s a penny stock? Color me
surprised...

~~~
SyneRyder
I'm not sure what you mean by the broken video - most likely you have an ad
blocker enabled.

~~~
TheAdamist
the ad video works fine, the content video just spins

~~~
SyneRyder
Strange, I'm not seeing that in Firefox 63.0.1 on macOS 10.13 once I disable
AdBlock Plus. Though to be honest, you're not missing anything, it's clearly a
company supplied video.

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purplezooey
Maybe we can actually start building housing now.

