Construction Automation Only Works in Two Places, and Bricklaying Isn't One of Them
Where has Construction Automation been successful?
Construction remains stubbornly labor-intensive, with direct labor nearly half the cost of a new US home. After using AI to comb through thousands of old trade journals, the author finds that successful automation falls into just two categories: off-site factory work like steel fabrication and precast concrete, and on-site tasks that mimic factory repetition, such as curb-forming and paving. Automatic bricklaying, tried since the early 1900s, has consistently failed because real walls are too irregular.
Automatic setting of bricks or concrete blocks seems like it would be the perfect construction task to automate: it’s both physically strenuous and extremely repetitive. But in practice, the task isn’t quite simple and repetitive enough to build a machine to easily do it.
- schnevets
I remember reading this article about Swedish home manufacturing two years ago, and immediately thought of the Hudson Valley (where I lived at the time)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-d...
The Hudson River used to be a main manufacturing artery of the United States but has since become a relic. I still believe that region upstream of NYC could address the housing crisis plaguing the northeast of the United States. Imagine barges of housing components drifting down-river to be assembled in any coastal metro on the Atlantic coastline.
- chrisguilbeau
I live near a 3d printed neighborhood in Georgetown, TX. We would have bought one if they'd had more than 3 bedroom floorplans. They are concrete and stay cool in the summer, they also all have solar panels...
Everyone I've talked to says they are wierd looking like the movie set of Edward Scissorhands or something, but it's mainly because they didn't leave old growth trees so every tree is < 5 years old (maybe for the printer to have room to move around?) and they are very very similar. People also don't like the concrete factor.
I don't know if it counts as successful but if we'd had fewer kids I'd be in one right now!
- xnx
I wonder how much of home construction efficiency improvements are held back by taste for traditional appearance vs. other cost/performance characteristics.
The difference in styles between residential and commercial construction is probably an example of this. Not many commercial buildings with tar paper shingled roofs.
- cortesoft
> Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car.
Is this only calculating last mile labor, or all the labor along the way? Like, for a car, does it count the cost of steel as purely non-labor costs, or do they factor in the labor cost for mining the ore, etc?
Because I feel like at the end of the day, almost all costs are 'labor' costs, they are just paid by different people/companies earlier in the process. Housing just has a lot of the labor as the final step, assembling the house on site. Cars have more of their labor at earlier stages of the process, and the assembling is mostly automated.
- adiabatichottub
The big changes I've seen over my lifetime have been tooling and materials. I remember when framers did everything with a hammer, a circular saw, and a speed-square. Now we have nail guns and cordless impact drivers and miter saws. Fiberglass batt insulation is still a thing, but now there's also urethane spray foam. We have engineered beams and OSB sheathing pre-coated with a moisture barrier. There's a lot of things that all add up to better performance and less manual labor.