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Robot bricklayer builds houses


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The brick laying robot would be a great help to automate home construction:

As long as you keep feeding it bricks, it can work continuously, placing 1,000 bricks an hour based on a CAD drawing. This works out to the shell of a new house every two or three days, complete with channels for plumbing and electrical. The whole system is mobile (although it relies on external localization), meaning that you can use it pretty much anywhere.

yep - that'd help :0

By comparison Contour Crafting is like a giant 3D printer:

Its creators estimate that construction using this system could reduce costs by 80 percent (!) while eliminating waste. It could potentially complete the structure of a 2,000 square foot (185 square meters) house in under 24 hours. And next, the moon!

I do think construction robots have a very bright future. 

In both of these cases, we’re very far from robots printing out finished houses. It’s nice that the robots are able to account (sometimes) for the space necessary for wires and pipes and stuff like that, but actually putting that infrastructure in place is still a task that requires a skilled human. What the robots are able to do is what robots are best at: time consuming, repetitive jobs that require heavy lifting and precision but little else.

It’s certainly possible (even likely) that construction robots will be able to do everything at some point in the future, but until then, construction still needs plenty of humans. Having said that, the number of humans who are learning skills like bricklaying appears to be decreasing significantly, so in the long term, rather than thinking of robots like this as taking jobs away from people, think of them as filling in for people as the human-driven construction workforce shrinks.

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