The birth of a bricklaying robot
The efforts of two inventors to revolutionize construction industry make ‘irresistible’ read
Bricklaying is one of the most ancient crafts around, one that hasn’t — as Jonathan Waldman puts it — changed much since “man crawled out of the muck.”
In 2006, two guys in upstate New York came up with an idea that they hoped would revolutionize the industry: They would build a robot capable of doing the back-breaking work that people had been doing for millennia. Nine years, and many, many experiments and failures later, they had a version of the robot that construction companies thought might be worth buying.
Before founding their company, Construction Robotics, Scott Peters was an engineer working on fuel cells at General Motors. His soon-to-be father-in-law, Nate Podkaminer, was an architect working as a project manager for a large construction firm.
Together, they conceived the idea of the robot they called SAM — for “semiautomated mason” — and began developing it. Waldman’s “SAM: One Robot, a Dozen Engineers, and the Race to Revolutionize
the Way We Build” is a fascinating account that follows the process from twinkle-in-the-eye to workable result on an almost month-by-month basis. It’s a story with enough twists and turns and surprising conflict to engage even those who have never looked closely at a brick, or wanted to.
It turns out there are reasons why robotics hasn’t entered the construction industry to any great extent. Though construction is a huge industry, it also is a deeply conservative one, “famously stubborn in its adoption of new technology,” Waldman writes.
It also takes place not in the “clear, climate-controlled space” where robots thrive, but “in the wild, where nothing was fixed or level or clean.”
Although the process of developing a working robot was frustrating for those involved, those struggles make for lively reading.
Often, operators had to give SAM a subtle nudge with a hand or foot to keep it from going off track. As the machine was subjected to new weather conditions, its inventors rigged a hair dryer to keep mortar from getting too mushy and a heating pad to maintain the proper temperature for the robot’s innards.
At its first public demonstration, Waldman writes, “the contrivance had a lot more in common with a tree house cobbled together by ten-year-olds than an iMac or even a minivan.” Waldman’s bemused account of bumpy progress, in which the innovators solved one problem only to be confronted by a dozen others, provides a believable and intriguing look at the way technological change lurches forward, as well as a personal look at the growing pains of a new company.
This is a story of people as well as of technological innovation, and Waldman is as interested in those doing the inventing and implementing as he is in their creations.
Waldman’s endless curiosity and lively explanations make the book irresistible for anyone inquisitive about machines and the people who make and use them.