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Where are the robotic bricklayers?

constructionphysics.substack.com

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Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#501

Post by jointpdf »

kumarvvr wrote: post #200

Perhaps wall construction / partition construction itself needs to be thought from the ground up, to enable automation. For example, is it possible to have LEGO like slot fitted bricks, with cavities in slots filled with mortar? Alternatively, toothed bricks that can be slotted, such that the top brick slots into two lower bricks.

Insulated concrete forms (ICFs) closely match what you described. They are hollow LEGOesque foam bricks that get filled with concrete.

Here is a great video (and a great channel generally) on the subject: https://youtu.be/MRipzKkeQik

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#502

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #457
123pie123 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but have low tensile strength which is probably why they aren't popular in North America) out of curiosity, why do the blocks need to be different in North America?

The person appears to be from Europe. If HN is the bulk of their exposure to mundane topics regarding the US I can see why they'd be unaware that California building codes are not representative of the rest of the nation.

But not your Texan school textbook regulations…

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#503

Post by profsnuggles »

moftz wrote: post #496
profsnuggles wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc. Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take th…

I was looking for a nice coffee table recently. I decided to try the unfinished wood furniture store, most of it made by the Amish or Menonites. I'm handy enough to stain but not equiped to build a table myself so I figured I'd save a few bucks doing the finish. Most the tables weren't our style but finally found one that looked great and was some real quality oak. Asked for the price and just about crapped my pants.…

That is also something people don't think about. Solid wood is great because it's easy to fix, but it's heavy and hard to move. Also it's less stable than a plywood and has to be taken care of.

We had a customer with a reception desk that had solid wood 5-piece raised panels in it. One of the panels cracked, so we sent them a new one under warranty and over 3-4 years it cracked more times. We finally sent someone to try to figure out the issue.

It was winter and the building was unusually warm and humid. The desk was positioned in front of the front door in a way that whenever it was opened the panel would get hit with an large blast of dry cold air. After convincing them to replace it with a more stable plywood raised panel simulacrum we haven't heard of an issue since.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#504

Post by Symmetry »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #389
atoav wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

After WWII there was a big boom in houses made that way in the United States too but then homebuilders were able to get legislation passed so that "a small manufactured house is disfavored because it’s mobile like a vehicle but it is also required by law to be mobile like a vehicle" and the problem for them went away.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/trailer-regulation

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#505

Post by ehnto »

eru wrote: post #461
h0l0cube wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen it before, and I've a basic understanding of GANs, I just don't see it being overly useful. This technique can make a really blurry simulacrum of an actual game, and that's really cool, but I'm not sure how it could be used to make a something both truly novel and coherent. There's plenty of low hanging fruit for AI within an engine, whereas using AI to be the entire engine is somewhat infeasible

You are right about the technique not being very useful as of today. My fascination stems from my assumption that more resources poured into this approach would yield vastly better results. Even just watching the video, I came up with several possible improvements to try out. Eg adversarial training, that would really hone in on the situations and aspects where the model is weak so far, like edge conditions; instead…

It's definitely an interesting area of research, but for that example you still had to make the whole game in the first place in order to have something to train the model on. Say you have a novel game idea, how could you use that approach to make it a reality? I'm not sure you could, but like you mention it's a really early example and who knows where it ends up.

The other part about that GAN Theft Auto example is that it doesn't actually know what's going on, like there's no game state. All it knows is that "When I have a frame that looks like this, and they press that button, I think the next frame would usually look like this". So it's got no internal game logic, it's just really good at painting what games look like.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#506

Post by saalweachter »

necovek wrote: post #424
imtringued wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. I see a lot of buildings that are 30 years old and they look ugly because they don't have any complexity in their facade, just a single color of paint. Bricks add natural complexity to a facade. You can make a single color building look nice by adding details.

Actual clay bricks even more so with their imperfect uniformity and consistency. FWIW, at least here, in construction even the thermal insulation clay blocks (basically, any wall-construction material made from clay, those red blocks :)) is called "bricks". They are laid exactly like the regular (uniform, filled) bricks, so I would assume that's what's mostly used in construction everywhere even when not going for lo…

It's funny how hard it is to fake imperfections.

People frequently try to mass-manufacture imperfections by having a larger block with smaller imperfect sub-blocks artistically arranged.

It looks fine at first, but once you notice the repetition of the imperfections at regular intervals...

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#507

Post by vbezhenar »

gridspy wrote: post #438
vbezhenar wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, there's often master bricker (who does all the skilled work) and dumb labour assistants who are doing dumb work like moving bricks, mix the cement and so on which does not require skill. Master gets all money and assistant gets some low payment (something like $1-$2/hour). I think that assistant work could easily be automated. But probably in my country low wages would make it economically unviable. But…

The odd thing about "dumb labor" is that many of those tasks are only easy for humans. Dealing in a messy world of human-to-human interfaces and cluttered unstructured worksites is generally hard for robots. The dog for instance might be able to drag a load, but would probably need help refilling it.

I expect dog to have a robotic hand and eyes, so it could refill himself, move bricks to a target location and put them onto the top of the wall, use stairs and so on. Of course it should not be a one-trick pony, the whole point is in something universal which could easily configured to perform different tasks.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#508

Post by amai »

Houses of the future will be build from sustainable materials like wood. The walls will be prefabricated in factories and then just assembled at the construction site like IKEA furniture.

There simply is no need for robotic bricklayers as there was no need for robotic horse feeding. Instead humanity invented cars.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#509

Post by Chris2048 »

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…

This is a different kind of innovation. The issue is not every improvement will be to the consumer.

Better weapons will enable you to kill better/faster/harder. Tech improves the "can", not the "should" - you still need politics to reign in control.

Re: Where are the robotic bricklayers?

#510

Post by profsnuggles »

eloisius wrote: post #500
profsnuggles wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc. Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take th…

Thanks for your take on it, I really don't want to be the anti-tech curmudgeon so I'm sincerely happy to read a different perspective. Especially your last paragraph makes me feel better. Maybe it's because CNC technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, or more likely because the staircase company I worked for were just cheapskates willing to strip mine their company's reputation. I feel like I had to recalib…

Well CNC technology has come a long way. The 5-axis machine we purchased was actually cheaper in absolute $ than the 20 year old 3-axis machine we were replacing it with.

But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss through the spoil board.

Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the new capacity it brought.

Although if there are people who are actually button pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different sized parts of of different material at the same time. The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove around to the different operations. They were even showing off handling non rectangular parts with no problem.

Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and... wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive but imagine 15 more years?

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