World’s first mobile bricklayer robot that boosts construction speed enters US

The world’s first bricklayer robot that’s capable of safely working outdoors in uncontrolled environments has arrived in the United States. Hadrian X can build the walls of a house in situ in as little as a day.

The giant machine is in the U.S. and once unloaded from the ship and cleared of customs, the next-generation Hadrian X will be transported to a facility in Fort Myers, Florida, according to reports.

The company claims that the next-generation Hadrian X is designed with distributed control architecture, leading to a highly reliable system which allows for individual modules to be customised, repaired and swapped efficiently.

Lengthened 32 metre telescopic boom arm provides further reach than its predecessor, enabling construction of walls three storeys high from the roadside as well as the ability to lay blocks within 50mm of existing walls, according to the company.

Software converts wall sketches into block positions

The machine has a unique optimisation software that converts wall sketches into block positions, and minimises handling and waste of block products to improve efficiency of residential construction.

Every supplier throughout the homebuilding process from the architect to the final trades will work from a single source of data, enabling parallel manufacture of materials, according to the FBR .

The machine is designed to be able to lay at speeds of up to 500 blocks per hour (equating to up to ~120m2 per hour) and has the potential to complete both the external and internal walls of a standard double brick house in a single day, according to FBR.

Machine will undergo an assessment

The machine will undergo an assessment to prove its readiness for site acceptance testing and then will begin a demonstration program in Florida.

According to FBR , the next-generation Hadrian X unit will undertake site acceptance testing at the facility, consisting of a test build outdoors with the same requirements as the previously completed factory acceptance testing, plus the inclusion of some bond beam blocks and an inspection from an independent structural engineer to confirm that the constructed walls of the test build are consistent with the design and meet applicable building standards.

Machine to construct the external walls between five and ten single-storey houses

Completion of the site acceptance testing will trigger a $600,000 payment by CRH Ventures to FBR, and will trigger the commencement of the demonstration program. The demonstration program requires FBR to construct the external walls of between five and ten single-storey houses utilising the next-generation.

The Hadrian X doesn’t apply mortar between the bricks while placing them. Once the wall is completed, a strong construction adhesive is applied to bond the individual bricks in place, and the company claims that this is stronger than old-school mortar construction, according to The Robot Report.

For working with precision in outdoor environments, Hadrian X uses FBR’s Dynamic Stabilisation Technology , which delivers accuracy previously only achievable with indoor robots, paving the way for robotic automation outdoors.

Traditionally robotics has been used indoors in controlled, stable and static environments to perform repetitious tasks, such as car manufacturing. Outdoors, robots are exposed to unpredictable and continuously changing interference such as wind, vibrations, altering machine motions and thermal variation, according to FBR .

“I invented DST to solve the problem of stabilising a robot at the end of a long moving boom, originally for an application that didn’t have enough demand to justify its development cost,” said Mark Pivac , Chief Technology Officer and primary inventor of FBR’s technology.

“A decade later, a building boom converged with a shortage of bricklayers, driving the cost of laying a brick up to $1.25. I knew my idea’s time had come.”