3 ms·

Fairly significant, apparently - you have to put up a scaffold alongside the wall for SAM to work. (And presumably, you need firm, open ground to put the thing

Fairly significant, apparently - you have to put up a scaffold alongside the wall for SAM to work. (And presumably, you need firm, open ground to put the thing on.) And they can't do corners or complex features, so when you hit those you need to either stop the machine or move it to a different part of the project. Headlines say they're 6x faster than normal masons, but that's during a given span of operation; over the course of a day, with overhead, it's apparently more like 3x. That said, the machines are in field use, since masons are scarce and expensive. You're right about the big jobs, too; they're apparently pretty much limited to sites like universities and hospitals which have lots of big, featureless walls. The Tech Review article about it is much more informative than the NYT one here. [1] I think this sort of automation worry seriously over-generalizes from factory robots. Robots are spectacular at doing repetitive tasks with nicely-arranged inputs and fixed workspaces. Hence, Amazon warehouses and Ford factory floors. But (as the SAM people admit) outdoor, new-worksite tasks are going to involve way more mixed human/robot tasks. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times-as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-t...

OrganicMSG 9y ago
Ideally you want a small robot that climbs the wall it builds with a crane follower being fed by brick fetching robots on the ground. If it was done properly you could fit it all on a flatbed and have it cheap enough to be bought by standard building crews.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  It did cross my mind that the one guaranteed "work surface" present when building a wall is the wall itself. I'm curious how the weight situation would work out, though. On one hand, fresh mortar can clearly support several new layers of brick as a wall is laid. On the other, common estimates suggest a 24 hour wait to reach 60% of final strength. How light would an on-wall robot have to be to work at a steady pace without disrupting the still-drying brick? The other question, I suppose, is whether the brick-supplying robot makes that redundant. It's either going to need a scaffolding or a cart/flatbed that moves frequently to keep feeding target that moves back and forth, and if you need a ground-supported robot arm right near the wall it might just be easier to do everything that way?
  - OrganicMSG 9y ago
    I was thinking that the crane robot would run along the wall behind the laying robot and fetch bricks from robot hovercraft that move pallets of bricks.
- neuromancer2701 9y ago
  Yeah, some of these first gen robots seem very stuck in old industrial equipment paradigm. A single Massive lumbering slow robots vs multiple smaller agile robots working together with modern software(e.g. ML/AL). There is no technical reason why the end user couldn't map out corners and turns in a CAD program. I think it is a physical limitation because the Bot is so large.

OrganicMSG 9y ago

Ideally you want a small robot that climbs the wall it builds with a crane follower being fed by brick fetching robots on the ground. If it was done properly you could fit it all on a flatbed and have it cheap enough to be bought by standard building crews.

Bartweiss 9y ago
It did cross my mind that the one guaranteed "work surface" present when building a wall is the wall itself. I'm curious how the weight situation would work out, though. On one hand, fresh mortar can clearly support several new layers of brick as a wall is laid. On the other, common estimates suggest a 24 hour wait to reach 60% of final strength. How light would an on-wall robot have to be to work at a steady pace without disrupting the still-drying brick? The other question, I suppose, is whether the brick-supplying robot makes that redundant. It's either going to need a scaffolding or a cart/flatbed that moves frequently to keep feeding target that moves back and forth, and if you need a ground-supported robot arm right near the wall it might just be easier to do everything that way?
- OrganicMSG 9y ago
  I was thinking that the crane robot would run along the wall behind the laying robot and fetch bricks from robot hovercraft that move pallets of bricks.
neuromancer2701 9y ago
Yeah, some of these first gen robots seem very stuck in old industrial equipment paradigm. A single Massive lumbering slow robots vs multiple smaller agile robots working together with modern software(e.g. ML/AL). There is no technical reason why the end user couldn't map out corners and turns in a CAD program. I think it is a physical limitation because the Bot is so large.