A one-armed Australian robot can build a house four times quicker than a brickie
VIDEO: A one-armed Australian robot can build a house
four times quicker than a brickie
CHRIS PASH JUL 27, 2016, 1:25 PM
Fastbrick Robotics, an ASX-listed company based in Perth,
has created a robot brick layer, a form of 3D printing which can create the
shell of a house without being touched by human hands.
The Hadrian 105 robot, named after the Roman emperor who
built a wall in ancient Britain, has hit a bricklaying speed of 225 standard
brick equivalents per hour, or about half a day’s work for a top human
bricklayer.
To prove it, the company released a time lapse video,
showing the robot at work. Here’s the robot, doing everything with one arm,
laying over-sized bricks, following a laser guided system:
The demonstration was designed to ensure that all of the
complex characteristics of a brick house can be handled by the Hadrian 105
robot.
The vision at Fastbrick Robotics is to create a machine
which can complete the brickwork of a home in three days at lower cost with
higher quality than traditional methods.
The company has started building the next prototype,
Hadrian X, which will have a capacity of up to 1,000 standard brick equivalents
an hour via a 30 metre boom, with everything being delivered to a building site
on the back of a truck.
That is double the daily output of a top bricklayer in
just one hour.
“We are a frontier technology company, and we’re one step
closer to bringing fully automated, end-to-end 3D printing brick construction
into the mainstream,” says Fastbrick CEO Mike Pivac.
“We’re very excited to be taking the world-first
technology we proved with the Hadrian 105 demonstrator and manufacturing a state-of-the-art
machine.”
The bricklaying market in Australia, UK, US and Canada is
worth about $12 billion.
Fastbrick Robotics says the competitive advantages with
its system include savings in time and costs plus better quality and safety of
construction.
The housing boom has pushed up the cost of bricklayers in
Australia. In Sydney, the cost of laying 1000 bricks is about $1500 and heading
to $2000.
At 300 to 500 bricks a day, a brickie can earn between
$600 and $1000.
Brickworks Ltd, in its latest half year profit results,
said: “The strong demand on the east coast is resulting in trade shortages.”
Fastbrick listed on the ASX in November in a reverse
takeover of DMY Capital. An oversubscribed IPO raised $5.75 million at 2 cents
a share.
It’s currently trading at 2.2 cents but has been as high
as 3.6 cents.
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