Construction workers beware. Not long ago we brought you news about a bricklaying robot named Hadrian capable of building an entire house in two days. Well, Hadrian is old news now. Now there’s a new robotic construction worker in town — Semi-Automated Mason (SAM).
SAM was created by New York-based company Construction Robotics to work alongside construction workers (not to actually steal their jobs) and increase productivity.
The robot, over seven years in the making, is capable of picking up bricks, applying the mortar, and then placing placing the bricks where they belong, while the human component of a construction team can do the less robotic tasks like arranging the work site, getting in those hard-to-reach areas, and making sure the facade looks nice.
“In construction, your design will say that a window is located exactly 30 feet from the corner of a building, and in reality when you get to the building, nothing is ever where it says it’s supposed to be,” Scott Peters, Co-founder of Construction Robotics, told MIT. “Masons know how to adapt to that, so we had to design a robot that knows how to do that, too.”
SAM comes equipped with sensors that measure angles, velocity, and orientation, as well as a laser that points out SAM’s next course of action so it knows where to lay bricks or where to go next.
The current working version of SAM can be best used to work on large flat walls, but the company is confident that SAM will be able to work on some more detailed aspects as well. According to MIT, “SAM can emblazon a company logo in brick on a wall, for instance, by following a pixelated map of the image. It can also bump bricks in or out by about half an inch, to create a textured look to a wall face.”
It’s reported by the company that SAM can lay 800 to 1,200 bricks per day, while the mere human mason can only lay about 300-500 per day. S0, if you team SAM up with a human construction worker, it’s like having the manpower of 3 or 4 workers.
Get to know SAM better in the introductory video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKoQMD0QZQs
Story via MIT Technology Review.
