Where are the robotic bricklayers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#341

Post by eloisius » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:27 AM UTC

cudgy wrote: post #323

eloisius wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.

Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#342

Post by cudgy » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:31 AM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #50

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #7

We had an "automated" pothole filler, in my town. When they purchased it, there was a bunch of hooplah. They had a news crew, in front of my house, showing it off. It spritzed asphalt into the pothole, tamped it down, then went on to the next one. All automatic! There was a driver, but he looked really bored. Months later, I have only seen one (probably the same one they demoed in front of my house). It was clearly d…

> They had a news crew, in front of my house, showing it off. Sounds like it did its job - it got some positive publicity for the people that bought it and manufactured it, and the fact that it doesn't actually work is a problem left with taxpayers and town employees.

Don’t forget the tire and wheel shops: loads of potholes boost their sales from repairing the damage done to the cars as a result of encountering the deeper potholes.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#343

Post by lazide » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #307

lazide wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who want a house built want to build their house. Cookie cutter is for subdivisions and apartments, which those folks are often trying to escape.

Prefab houses are a thing and they aren't exactly rare. People escaping apartments usually complain about neighbors or lack of a garden, not about the floor plan.

They are pretty rare, at least here in the US, and widely seen as undesirable or 2nd-3rd tier at best.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#344

Post by IkmoIkmo » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:34 AM UTC

octokatt wrote: post #98

spyckie2 wrote: post #31

The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing som…

I’d add to the list of why partial automation isn’t worth it: it’s more satisfying to build a brick wall than babysit a bricklaying machine. Doing the physical labor is difficult. My father was a bricklayer from ten to fifty, when he finally had to stop working. But he loved showing me the buildings he built. He helped build city government buildings, schools, libraries. The pride he felt, that he’d built something w…

> We don’t need to solve just for the physical actions, but also for the human experience of building and the feeling of mastery. Particularly for physical trades.

Why? At the end of the day there'll be two companies offering to build your wall. Human vs Tech-assisted Human (and eventually, robot). If one is faster, more accurate and cheaper, the buyer will choose it. The other will go out of business.

It's not about masons embracing this, it's about clients embracing superior outcomes (quality, price and/or time). Eventually the few masons that make the switch to superior outcomes will push the others out of the market.

That is of course assuming tech-assisted/robot will actually be better. At the moment it's not in the vast majority of cases. But granting that assumption, I don't think 'satisfying the human experience of a mason' will go into the equation for long.

That's not a value judgement, I think building good human experiences is important. I just don't think in the decision making process it'll matter due to inevitable competition.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#345

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #329

ben_bai wrote: post #313

The robotic bricklayers are in the factories. They do construct prefab elements that then get hauled to the building site to be quickly assembled. Usually it's done with wood but there are also factories that build prefab houses with bricks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJIDjdFTVW8

So, I don't understand how this can be cheaper. I just saw a neighbor put together a house out of large bricks with six guys in two days. Doing the same using this method seems like it would have been more expensive. Is this an economies-of-scale thing or what? Edit: Here's a second video [1] where they use concrete. It says that factory can makes enough for 60 houses per year. It also says, at the end, that it's not…

[deleted]

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#346

Post by cudgy » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:36 AM UTC

Gibbon1 wrote: post #330

empiricus wrote: post #315

For my new house, laying the bricks (aerated concrete blocks actually) took 2 days. The rest of the house took more than one year to finish. Not really necessary to optimize this step in many cases.

I think about that every time I see yet another article on 3d printing houses. My parents added a bedroom to a stick framed house. The floor joists took a weekend. Nailing together and erecting walls took one weekend. Framing the roof, another weekend. That was my dad, mom, brother and I. And we used a skill saw, hammers and nails. I think the issue is each task of itself is fairly optimized. Yet there are a large nu…

Why? Isn’t most of the West one of the the least densely populated areas in the United States? Seems there would be lots of land to build single family homes.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#347

Post by uCantCauseUCant » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:37 AM UTC

NonContro wrote: post #164

spyckie2 wrote: post #31

The value of work is not in the work done; it's in the decisions being made. It's the ability to handle edge cases, to work your way through ambiguity, to "unstuck" a stuck situation, and to resolve tricky unforeseen issues. If you build a robot that only handles the main workflow and can't handle any of the exceptions, you're not automating anything; you're building a convenience tool. Basically, you're removing som…

I'm planning to build a house, and it has surprised me that standardised house plans are not readily available online - particularly for European weather conditions - the emphasis is instead on custom floorplans. Creating new designs millions of times over seems like an obvious inefficiency.

The trick is to ask somebody who you know, who built a house similar to the one you plan for a copy of the plans.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#348

Post by taneq » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

guerrilla wrote: post #329

ben_bai wrote: post #313

The robotic bricklayers are in the factories. They do construct prefab elements that then get hauled to the building site to be quickly assembled. Usually it's done with wood but there are also factories that build prefab houses with bricks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJIDjdFTVW8

So, I don't understand how this can be cheaper. I just saw a neighbor put together a house out of large bricks with six guys in two days. Doing the same using this method seems like it would have been more expensive. Is this an economies-of-scale thing or what? Edit: Here's a second video [1] where they use concrete. It says that factory can makes enough for 60 houses per year. It also says, at the end, that it's not…

From what I've heard from friends who build, it's less about having six guys show up and two days later there's a house, it's about what happens when they're busy and don't show up for three months while the cost of materials goes through the roof and you're stuck renting and/or paying two mortgages.

If you can engineer out some of the potential delays that can take a huge amount off the overall cost.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#349

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #341

cudgy wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice story. Tech is not always an improvement. In fact, the more years I live, the less enamored with tech I’ve become due to many examples like this.

Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but…

[deleted]

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#350

Post by IkmoIkmo » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

function_seven wrote: post #146

dragonsky67 wrote: post #130

The question I would have around automated building construction is "why use bricks?". Bricks are great for humans to build with, they are just the right size and weight for the human hand to manipulate and place. They are not optimised for machine manipulation. I would guess that if you wanted to automate construction you would start by making things like walls on an automated production line, then ship the largest…

Because they’re pleasant to look at. Half the time, the wall isn’t even “needed”, other than for aesthetic purposes. Whenever a wall is purely functional, it’s almost never made of small clay bricks today. I’m talking about foundation walls, subsurface retaining walls, and similar things. The types of walls that aren’t meant to be looked at, but instead meant to hold something back or up. Whenever you see a wall bein…

Yup. I'm from Amsterdam, the Netherlands as an example. A ton of the city and country has been built with brick. But modern construction typically is built with concrete with a thin facade of brick infront. The brick is just cosmetic, and typically pre-fab in large slabs of 20x20 bricks.

For old homes that get renovated, it's popular to keep the old brick facade standing, demolish everything behind it, then build it up again.

It's rarely functional.

Although there are still a lot of old (mostly built between 1400 - 1950) brick buildings that get maintained with proper masonry, all of which is functional.