Bricklaying has been around for around 6,000 years. It’s slow, methodical, and, in one fell swoop, it’s just been made pretty much redundant.
FastBrick Robotics, an Austrlian company, has invented a bricklaying machine that can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and lay up to 1,000 bricks an hour. We don’t have the stats on how fast human bricklayers are, but we’re pretty sure they aren’t that fast.
The machine was developed by the company’s CEO, Mike Pivac, who also seems to have been responsible for the machine’s name. As Pivac told Mashable Australia, Hadrian “built a lot of walls for the Romans”, and the company also intends to build a hell of a lot of walls. In fact, it claims the machine could singlehandedly churn out around 150 houses a year.
The robot itself is built along the line of other, factory-bound robotic arms, and similar bricklaying robots like SAM.
The machine dispenses bricks along a kind of conveyor belt system on its long arm:
It also uses laser technology to make sure each brick lines up correctly with those to the side and beneath it.
The machine is still only a prototype, though Fastbrick Robotics is hoping to produce a commercial model soon. But what will this mean for human bricklayers? Pivac told PerthNow:
We have absolutely nothing against bricklayers. The problem is the average age of bricklayers is going up and it’s difficult to attract young people to the trade.
Perhaps they’ll be keener now it involves operating lasers and robots.
Images: FastBrick Robotics.
