19 Comments
Jul 30, 2021Liked by Brian Potter

Bricks and CMUs were developed specifically because they are of a size and weight that a single worker could manipulate. It would be quite odd if a robot could be better at a technique that evolved specifically for the human body. The benefits to robotics (if any) will be in a different medium that is tailored to its capacities and abilities.

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Bring to mind for me the theologian Stanley Hauerwas' reflections on brick-laying, including:

"To learn to lay brick, it is not sufficient for you to be told how to do it; you must learn to mix the mortar, build scaffolds, joint, and so on. Moreover, it is not enough to be told how to hold a trowel, how to spread mortar, or how to frog the mortar. In order to lay brick you must hour after hour, day after day, lay brick.

Of course, learning to lay brick involves learning not only myriad skills, but also a language that forms, and is formed by those skills. Thus, for example, you have to become familiar with what a trowel is and how it is to be used, as well as mortar, which bricklayers usually call "mud." Thus "frogging mud" means creating a trench in the mortar so that when the brick is placed in the mortar, a vacuum is created that almost makes the brick lay itself. Such language is not just incidental to becoming a bricklayer but is intrinsic to the practice. You cannot learn to lay brick without learning to talk "right."

The language embodies the history of the craft of bricklaying. So when you learn to be a bricklayer you are not learning a craft de novo but rather being initiated into a history. For example, bricks have different names--klinkers, etc.—to denote different qualities that make a difference about how one lays them. These differences are often discovered by apprentices being confronted with new challenges, making mistakes, and then being taught how to do the work by the more experienced.

All of this indicates that to lay brick you must be initiated into the craft of bricklaying by a master craftsman. It is interesting in this respect to contrast this notion with modern democratic presuppositions. For as I noted above, the accounts of morality sponsored by democracy want to deny the necessity of a master. It is assumed that we each in and of ourselves have all we need to be moral. No master is necessary for us to become moral, for being moral is a condition that does not require initiation or training. That is why I often suggest that the most determinative moral formation most people have in our society is when they learn to play baseball, basketball, quilt, cook or learn to lay bricks. For such sports and crafts remain morally antidemocratic insofar as they require acknowledgment of authority based on a history of accomplishment."

https://chamberscreek.net/library/hauerwas/hauerwas1991discipleship.html

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This article is now on the front page of HackerNews. See other comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28054606

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I am in the Bricklayers union local #1 in. CT. One of the biggest problems we have today is that these young kids don't want to do that kind of work it's very hard work it is hard on the body and these kids are getting lazer and lazer they want to make that good money but don't want to put in the time and hard work of takes to do it I see it a lot now always on their phones and not really into it we have a big problem I don't see it getting any better soon.

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I'm a founder of a robotic company. A fundamental point looks missing in this analysis: what is the proposed cost of these solutions? In my experience this is the first issue of robotics today, it's just too expensive. This will partially get mitigated by RaaS, but RaaS itself is only sustainable if the raw cost of the robot is low.

Now, since as you say a machine to manoeuvre heavy object will need extra safety, robustness and structure, you can conclude that it is very hard for this tech to be cost efficient w.r.t. few wage construction worker.

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Very interesting! My grandfather was a brick mason. I particularly liked the “non-newtonian fluid” mortar discussion.

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There seems to be an analogy here to problems of using artificial intelligence. They can handle the routine cases, but situation specific details present challenges which are difficult to automate. Because mortar is always going to have distinct characteristics each time the mason puts down a brick, that last moment in the process is (probably) always going to require skilled judgment. The best bet would seem to be automating everything up to the point that that human skill and sensitive judgment is required, particularly doing things which take the stress off of the human skeletal and muscle frame and let machinery handle the literal heavy lifting. The key here, as in all other fields I have read about, seems to be the same: automate everything which actually can be automated, leave to human intervention was only human intervention can do, and be careful and precise about identifying which is which.

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I worked as a hod carrier for a few years after graduating high school and eventually graduated to being an actual bricklayer (if not an actual mason, my last name notwithstanding).

The section about mortar and its variable properties was one of my very first thoughts as to why it would be difficult for robots to properly lay brick. Another issue I thought of is that brick spacing isn't the same for every job, or even within the same job, so having the robot use a standard pacing wouldn't work, unless it was able to be re-programmed constantly to account for the variation in spacing.

Another factor, which was somewhat referenced with the part where the robots can't negotiate corners or the end cap bricks, is the matter of making cuts to the brick. There are multiple points throughout a job where individual bricks have to be cut with a masonry saw to fit the specific section they're in, and then have to be used in the correct spot in every corresponding row, or around windows, doors, what have you. That process would slow down a robot as well.

There's just so much variance in the job that trying to prepare the robot ahead of time to account for every possible variable seems like way more work than just having a thinking human account for the variables as they go.

All that said, I think the options for making the lifting of materials easier is probably the way forward for a lot of companies, since that reduces the physical strain on the individual, while still retaining the human brain processing part of the equation.

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This is likely a niche development, but I figured no harm sharing this FT article on 3D-printing technology here for information:

https://www.ft.com/content/7a8c4589-4d7a-4d3b-a89d-9c311c0f2b6d

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Well done, thanks! https://substack.com/

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In terms of tools for assisted bricklaying, you may want to check out the augmented reality masonry systems like Fologram/Hololens which enable easier design and placement of unusual shapes/contours, among other things.

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the commenter below me reframed the question to "What is the cost of these solutions?"Let me reframe it once more. What is the desire to have such solutions? Not for you and me, of course we want homes with lower costs, and the bricklayers no doubt would love them-provided they continued to get payed-they wont, then whom am I referring to? People paying attention during this "pandemic" might have noticed a group, the World Economic Forum, and they literally evil founder Klauss Swab-he has the backing of many of the richest people in the world, and most politicians in most countries. How can that be you ask? Well if you have listed to any of their recent meetings, which are online for all, they will tell you. Its simple, blackmail. The internet has provided them they ability to blackmail almost anyone, whether they have abnormal turn ons, or simply teens, to the wife and kids it likely makes little difference. For the hardliners, like Zimbabwee's President, Haiti's president, Tanzania &Madagascar all dead shortly after speaking out on Covid, and the Great Reset aka New World Order Communist takeover of the world.

they dont want you to Shwab himself has said "in 10 years you will own nothing-and be happy"

so what is the point of bricklaying robots, if there will be no more bricklayers?

fight this people, please

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The idea that the issues with the systems come from trying to automate a manual task is my main takeaway. In my field of manufacturing automation, I've seen quite a few projects where a human operator was straight swapped for a robot run into numerous problems and end up slower and less efficient. The incentive to do this is often quite obvious, the cost to replace a work cell can be extremely expensive and redesigning a system is hard, but in the end, a process that has been tailored to the strengths of a human operator causes far too many problems for a robot.

I'm sure future masonry automation projects that are successful will do so because they are happy to move away from standard bricklaying processes to utilise the strengths of robots such as their lifting capacity and accuracy. Perhaps future systems will use larger interlocking bricks or prefabricated wall segments.

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Newer machine learning technologies *should* make mortar placement and cleanup easier for various reasons. For one thing, instead of building some hypothetical mortar-placed-and-jointed-well sensor, you can "just" use a camera and the computer can "see" the qualities of the place mortar.

Not that it's an easy task by any means, but certainly well worth experimentation.

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