Mark Pivac, inventor of the bricklaying robot, Hadrian, said that his bot can place 1,000 bricks an hour, enough to erect the walls of a house in two days of round-the-clock work—a task that, on average, takes a human crew four to six weeks of hard labor.
The robot works a little like a 3D printer, similarly taking its cues from a digital 3D model of the structure it’s building. Instead of extruding plastic or sintering metal, it cuts bricks to size, mortars them, and precisely lays each in place using a grasper at the end of a 28 meter telescopic boom.