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Australian robot bricklayer can build house in 2 days

Xinhua, June 29, 2015 Adjust font size:

An Australian inventor is developing a robot which can lay bricks and build a home in two days.

The fully automated machine could replace the role of people engaged in the back-breaking work of laying bricks piece by piece to create the sturdy shell of homes.

The robot can work 24 hours, 365 days, compared to the human variety who can put in anywhere from four to six weeks of painful work for a typical home, Fairfax Media reported.

Perth inventor Mark Pivac, an aeronautic and mechanical engineer, said his interest in the idea of developing the robot came during the city's bricklaying crisis in 2005 when there was an acute shortage of labor specializing in the craft.

"People have been laying bricks for about 6,000 years and ever since the industrial revolution, they have tried to automate the bricklaying process," Pivac said.

The robot is called "Hadrian", named after the famous Roman defensive wall of antiquity, will be commercialized first in Western Australia, then nationally and then globally.

Laying 1,000 bricks per hour, it can work day and night, with the potential to erect 150 homes a year.

It works by creating a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) laying program of a house or structure, then calculates the location of every brick and creates a program that is used to cut and lay the bricks in sequence from a single, fixed location.

A 28-meter telescopic boom-arm sets the mortar and the brick is then laid in the correct sequence following the program commands. The robot de-hacks, measures, scans for quality and cuts to length the bricks and routs for electrical and other services.

Nearly 2-billion bricks are manufactured a year in Australia.

But the industry is suffering as younger people are not pursuing a career in it, Pivac said.

"We have absolutely nothing against bricklayers...The problem is the average age of bricklayers is going up and it's difficult to attract new young people to the trade."

Investment company DMY Capital Limited has just announced it will acquire 100 percent of Pivac's company, Fastbrick Robotics. Endi