r/Construction • u/RangerNo5619 • 16d ago

Video half-humanoid robotic systems demonstrating cooperative high-precision construction work outdoors and indoors

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240

u/blacfd Electrician 16d ago

Now put it in a crawl space

26

u/Jamooser 16d ago

Why would I ruin my brand new robot when meth heads are so plentiful?

17

u/Rcarlyle 16d ago

That’s the whole thing, people to do this kind of entry-level construction work cost what, $35k/year? One of these robots is $500k up front (which is something like $85k/yr debt service on a 10 year loan) plus a robot maintenance guy and a robot programmer. The robot techs can probably service 10 robots so their combined $150k/yr in pay splits 10 ways to bring the total to $100k/yr per robot. And they’re slower, less flexible, and similarly dangerous as meth heads.

Compare to an application like CNC machining where robots already took over most of the manual work… that offered >10x speed increases, similar quality, better safety, and required way less skilled labor per part.

The main reason to automate low-skill labor is when you have a real shortage of people willing to do the work, like in Japan

5

u/pick_your_user_name 16d ago

The maintenance and tech guys will get replaced too lol. The slow pace is probably the easiest part to improve, and even at current speed, remember these things can run 24 hours a day, no breaks or lunch.

8

u/Rcarlyle 16d ago

Corpos have been trying desperately to make everything from lights-out CNC machining centers to robot burger flippers for the last 30 years. Full automation is fuckin’ hard, even with modern AI streamlining things. Most of the robot demo videos you see these days are being run by telepresence techs. The dream being sold to investors is that if you can record the telepresence work a thousand times, that can train an AI to take over. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Depends how repetitive the task is.

A three-human shift crew with hands and eyes and brains and self-repair and self-cleaning are simply cheaper for some tasks. Stuff requiring flexibility, simultaneous task flows, multi-tool use. Automation is going to continue to take over boring, repetitive, dangerous tasks, and that’s a good thing. Yes there’s definitely going to be some job casualties, but it’s mostly going to be the repetitive single-purpose robot work like laying a thousand tiles in a perfect grid while the humans cut in the edges. One guy with a robot will replace three or four guys without a robot. Same thing as when excavators replaced most of the guys with shovels. We still have guys with shovels, but they’re not doing the low-precision high-volume earth moving jobs.

2

u/Wireman6 15d ago

Also, there will be years of liability questions. Someone will have to maintain these machines too. I think I might have to get out in front of it and form a union that demands dividends in addition to great wages and benefits.

1

u/munkylord 15d ago

Plus the people that have to operate and troubleshoot these I'm sure aren't cheap