Where are the robotic bricklayers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#381

Post by necovek » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

joshfraser wrote: post #379

The reasons are economic, not technological. There's a surplus of cheap labor in the world, so it doesn't make financial sense to bear the upfront costs.

That's oversimplified. First robots usually did not make economic sense. After they were made useful and sold in quantities, this made them worth their initial investment.

The problem is simply fricking hard. Bricks need to be split into pieces (half-bricks, third-bricks etc) to accommodate windows, doors and edges. Due to real-world plot plans, there will be plenty of non-right angles. And yes, there's laying mortar which is an art form :D

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#382

Post by imtringued » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

mavhc wrote: post #376

concordDance wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> freed up 40% of the workforce. And did that actually improve everyone's quality of life? Or did it just increase the cost of positional goods (check out house prices in the West)?

It improved the quality of life of people who didn't have to spend all day washing floors. Isn't the point that house prices are high because they've not been automated? And also that people expect to buy a house using a massive loan over decades. Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might as well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper

House prices are high because land prices are high. There are some cities where permitting is a nightmare and the "brainy" people displaced the "brawny" people but those are the exception.

>Although from the videos it looks like the brick walls don't actually hold anything up half the time, so might as well replace them with brick patterned wallpaper

Idea: Assemble the wall paper on the ground with a machine and install it in one go.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#383

Post by josefx » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:05 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.

I wouldn't be surprised if the architects making the plans had catalogues with existing designs. I would however be surprised if they gave weeks/months of work to get them into compliance with non trivial legal requirements away for free.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#384

Post by yholio » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:05 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #124

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…

> This is both economically unviable and largely unpopular. And yet, you can make billions of dollars on it. This is literally the modus operandi of modern tech companies like Google and Amazon. Automate the main workflow, silently ignore exceptions, and if anyone complains about problems (or your non-existent customer support), just wave your hands in the air and mumble something about "scale being hard".

If you can automate 80% of the jobs your customers require, you can make a billion dollars and send the other 20% potential customers to talk to Mailer Daemon. If you automate 80% of every job and leave 20% to every customer, you have no customers.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#385

Post by danhor » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #102

egh wrote: post #28

The great contempt that computer people have for the skills that every human brings to the jobs that the do is always on display here. We haven't automated driving; we haven't automated picking tomatoes; we haven't automated bricklaying; we can't automate cooking a fucking hamburger. But they are completely convinced that it's just around the corner, because they are full of contempt for the skill and intelligence of…

I don't think this is it. Computer people tend to work in office settings. The reason the old joke about threatening to replace people with shell scripts works is because a lot of office jobs can be replaced with shell scripts. This is because, rather than physically working in the real world, most office jobs entail manipulating symbols, which is easy for computers but hard for humans. (That's why we invented comput…

> ton of jobs are "automated" by a computer that just gives a continuous stream of verbal instructions to a poorly paid human being.

Isn't that basically amazon warehouses today? (though text based)

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#386

Post by toyg » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:07 AM UTC

VBprogrammer wrote: post #372

brnt wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.

For me this feels like robotics operating at the wrong layer of abstraction. It's like those old tomorrow's world programs where they show the robotic helper diligently sweeping the floor with a grass broom. In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming…

In many ways this is what much of prefab is. Building is carried out offsite by robots, and humans just assemble panels onsite. However, this reduces the adaptability of the building, increases transport and storage costs and complexity, and creates new issues (apparently prefabs can be at higher risk of fire).

Construction is one of those things where the process is much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes would suggest.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#387

Post by necovek » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

nashashmi wrote: post #35

Probably the biggest problem in automating construction is not just that every job is in a different location but these materials are so bulky and heavy and composite that the cost is not in the labor of installation but moving the materials to location. Asphalt paving requires 4 guys to level the asphalt but a truck to pour it. The best you can get is an attachment on the truck to level the asphalt. This attachment…

Even with leveling I can imagine a bunch of problems: to drive water away, roads are usually tilted to one side, or even to both, and there's a slight curve to them. Depending on the width of the road, that curve will have ever so slightly different characteristics which makes it harder to achieve (compared to humans doing it manually but less consistently).

Still, a lot simpler than laying bricks, which is why it's already there :D

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#388

Post by rubenbe » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:09 AM UTC

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…

Also, adding complex robots adds the need for more qualified (hence more expensive) personnel. It's better to have only have to recruit and pay "bricklayer"-profile instead of the rare "can fix complex robots and is a bricklayer"-profile.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#389

Post by MomoXenosaga » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

atoav wrote: post #300

mbesto wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why partial robotic systems don't really exist; either it's a nifty tool that speeds up a small repeatable process of your work, or it's building the entire house. I think I understand your overall point, but what you said isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process" essentially a partial robotic system? Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's essentially one big chain of robotics…

Yeah, but houses are rarely like a serial manufactured car. Sometimes you have to lay down every row of bricks differently with a ton of unplanned (or unplannable) things to account for, because the electrician might work while you lay your brick etc. Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot…

In my country houses are build in factories and then assembled on site. You rarely build a single house you build an entire neighbourhood in one go.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#390

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 04, 2021, 9:14 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]