2 days ago
Robot bricklayers that can work round the clock coming to Britain
Robot bricklayers are set to be trialled on British construction sites amid warnings of a major labour shortage in the house building industry.
The machines, developed by Dutch company Monumental, use two mechanical arms that dispense mortar and lay bricks at a similar pace to a human.
That is equivalent to roughly 500 bricks per robot in a typical eight-hour shift, but they can be programmed to work around the clock if required – albeit under human supervision.
It represents one potential solution to help ease a chronic shortage of brickies in Britain's construction industry, with experts warning that at least 25,000 more are needed to meet the Government's house-building plans.
In the Netherlands, Monumental's machines have already built facades for dozens of houses as well as canal-supporting walls in housing developments. They can construct straight-lined brick walls and some cornering.
Now, Monumental is preparing to trial the machines in the UK for the first time with London bricklaying contractor Galostar, a company that has previously worked on residential projects as well as bigger schemes such as the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, east London, and the capital's Sadler's Wells Theatre.
Tony Chapman, Galostar's managing director, said the tests were expected to begin next month.
They will initially focus on whether the robots can be successfully adapted to British standards and can handle being deployed on scaffolding.
He said: 'We don't think they [the machines] will ever completely replace brickies, but they can certainly help with the skills shortages we are dealing with.
'From our point of view it also helps because the robots don't need breaks, they don't take time off, and so if you have several of them you will know exactly what your output is going to be.'
One person can supervise two of the machines at once but the supervisor does not need to be a qualified bricklayer, meaning it should be easier to keep construction sites manned, said Salar al Khafaji, Monumental's co-founder.
He said: 'You just contract us to do work, and we will come with our machines to do the work, instead of a bunch of humans.
'Your labour pool will now be much bigger, and you can work multiple shifts.'
He expects to charge about the same as the going rate for a human brickie, or around £1 per brick.
Monumental says the robots can also be programmed to lay different brick configurations and patterns. It potentially opens the door for a return to the more elaborate styles of brickwork beloved by Victorian and Edwardian builders that are considered too labour-intensive by large-volume housebuilders today.
'Today, if you want to ask for a very nice, patterned facade with two brick colours, you'll get an outrageously expensive quote, because it's quite hard and it will slow the masons down,' Mr al Khafaji added.
'But this is exactly the kind of thing that robots excel at – you just enter it once, and our system allows you to have a mixed supply of coloured bricks and different types of bricks.
'And we won't charge you more, because it's not more expensive. So you'll be able to bring some of those things back into the industry.
'We're doing a canal wall in Amsterdam soon with really elaborate patterns – bricks sticking out, that sort of thing. It's kind of crazy, I'm very excited about it.'
Mr al Khafaji is a former executive at Palantir, the US defence tech giant co-founded by PayPal billionaire and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel.
He said he wanted to apply his expertise in software and machine learning to help solve problems in the construction industry, which has long been viewed by economists as a laggard.
He co-founded Monumental in 2021 with Sebastiaan Visser. The pair raised $25m (£18.6m) from investors last year.
They have long been eyeing the UK – where roughly five times as many bricks are laid per year than in the Netherlands – because of the huge national shortage of bricklayers.
A recent report by the Home Builders Federation and the Construction Industry Training Board estimated that 25,000 more brickies are needed to meet the Government's target to build 1.5m homes before the next election.
