IS ROBO-SAM THE FUTURE FOR UK CONSTRUCTION?

The UK brickie could soon be replaced by robots this year according to the US construction market where robo brickies are already being used on some construction sites.

The Semi-Automated Mason (named SAM) can lay 3,000 bricks a day compared to human brickies who only manage 500 on average! Anyone coasting on building sites should beware…they might one day be replaced by robots!

This is not some science fiction-based vision of the future where we all wear metallic trousers and go to Mars on holiday; it’s real 21^st century innovation that might soon see robotic brickies cross the Pond and build more complex buildings more quickly than ever before without ever breaking a sweat or demanding a tea break.

It may be an extreme example of how technology is affecting the way we design and construct our built environment, but it’s an indication of just how far the construction sector has come in embracing  technology.

And the virtual reality technology currently being used by the sector as a visualisation tool could one day be used in combination with robots to improve site safety and alleviate the skills gap by enabling professionals to work remotely.

For those of us who loved watching ‘Tomorrow’s World’ on TV and remember how few of those game changing inventions ever actually reached our daily lives, it’s easy to be cynical about future technological advances. The reality is, however, that our use of technology has grown exponentially since those first future-predicting episodes were broadcast in the 1960s.  We might never have believed back then that we’d all have a handheld device that could call and send messages to contacts, access data from the ether, take and store pictures and help us find our way to anywhere we want to go.

So are you ready to be replaced by SAM? I’m certainly not!