As technology continues to evolve, so will the way construction professionals build our homes, buildings, cities, and infrastructure, brick by brick. Robotics are set to reimagine how contractors build both on-site and off-site. Let’s look at how AI (artificial intelligence) is powering autonomous construction robots to do work on jobsites across Europe.
As one example, Monumental was founded in 2021 by CEO Salar al Khafaji and CTO Sebastiaan Visser. Together, they have brought together artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, and low-cost hardware to develop robots that are capable of working on-site.
Earlier this year, the company raised $25 million to scale this technology across Europe. The funding will be used to grow the team, scale the number of robots, and increase the types of blocks and construction tasks the robots can manage.
Here is how this can help in construction:
- Place bricks and mortar with precision, accuracy, and efficiency and small enough to go anywhere a human can.
- Could increase productivity by 50-60%.
- Monumental serves as a sub, removing the financial risk.
This meets a big need today, as more than half of the countries in Europe are facing a severe shortage of bricklayers. In the U.K. alone, there’s an estimated lack of 75,000 bricklayers needed to build the 300,000 houses needed annually by 2025.
Certainly, this isn’t necessarily a completely new concept. We first met SAM, the bricklaying robot from Construction Robotics back in 2016. SAM wasn’t alone either in the market. Another bricklaying counterpart is Hadrian X, developed by FBR in Australia. What is new is the rise of AI and how that could contribute to building structures in new and efficient ways. Stay tuned. The robots are sure to impact construction.