Humanoid
Monumental, a developer betting on robots to address construction’s labor shortage, is focusing on bricklaying as its first task. The company’s Pisa robot handles laying bricks and mortar, aiming to bridge a gap where 92% of contractors struggle to fill roles and the U.S. is short 4.5 million homes.
According to the Association of General Contractors, the labor shortage is acute, and trends suggest it will worsen as more workers retire and fewer young people enter the field. Monumental’s founder and CEO, Salar al Khafaji, sees this as a unique opportunity for robotics. “Construction is a really interesting use case for robots and AI, because it’s one of the few industries where the narrative is really not AI and robots coming in to replace labor to make things cheaper or redundant,” al Khafaji told The Robot Report. “It’s literally there’s not enough people to do the work. We desperately need this technology.”
“It’s literally there’s not enough people to do the work. We desperately need this technology.”
Monumental chose bricklaying for two reasons. First, it is difficult work, and al Khafaji believes that if the team can automate this task, it can likely take on a range of other tasks on a construction site. Second, bricklaying is a critical labor shortage area: “If you look at Western Europe, bricklayers are literally the No. 1 job-shortage category in multiple countries, like the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany,” al Khafaji said.
The construction process of a typical home can be broken into three major stages, al Khafaji explained. The first is ground preparation, using excavators and ground movers to build the foundation. This stage has seen the most momentum for robotics so far. The article does not detail the other two stages or Monumental’s deployment timeline.
Source: The Robot Report