Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Hadrian X bricklaying robot completes the walls of first display home

The presentation of the Hadrian X bricklaying robot took place in 2015, when its creator, Robotics tech company FastBrick (FBR), first demonstrated the capabilities of its giant manipulator arm. The robot is capable of laying up to 1,000 bricks per hour. FBR presented its first prototype, with the promise of optimizing it to revolutionize the construction sector for years to come.

The company has spent the last five years improving its robot, and today it is not only limited to laying bricks. It can independently lay bricks and apply the mortar and adhesive needed to hold it all together with the help of a telescopic boom mounted on an excavator or truck. Its unique control system uses CAD (computer-aided design) to create a 3D model of the building design, which is then used to calculate the materials list and tell Hadrian X what to build – all with precision.

At the beginning of 2019, Hadrian X successfully completed its first full-scale test by building a 180 square meter house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, in less than three days. If the work had been done by human workers, it would have taken several weeks.

Now, the automaton is already working on real projects and is building its first houses. In fact, the Australian company has recently announced the completion of building the structural walls of its first display home in Dayton, Western Australia.

Here, the robot has been part of a work team, and its mission has been to raise the walls of the structure of the sample house. This job has taken him only three and a half shifts of a human worker. After building the structure, the robot has given way to human operatives to continue the work.

In this way, Hadrian X has demonstrated that it is qualified to be part of real-world construction teams, streamlining processes, and freeing human workers from heavy and repetitive tasks. The company will now recalibrate Hadrian X to handle larger building blocks, which will allow the robot to build future structures approximately 25% faster.