Will Sam the robot kill off the brickie?

HE can lay up to six times as many bricks a day as a human brickie without once stopping for a tea break.

And with Sam the Robot, there is no unsightly display of builder’s cleavage – or cheeky wolf-whistling at female passers-by.

The machine is heading for the UK with a warning that he will put thousands of traditional construction jobs at risk. But it is not all bad news for Bob the Builder. Sam still needs two humans to operate him.

Sam – short for Semi-Automated Mason – can pick up a brick, apply mortar via a nozzle and use his arm to place it. He lays up to 3,000 bricks a day, compared with an average of 500 for his human rivals.

Workers are still required to operate the computer controls, load the robot, supervise health and safety, help lay bricks at difficult angles and clear up.

The robots are already being used in the US and their creator plans to bring them to the UK within months.

New York-based Construction Robotics rents out a gang of six bricklaying machines for about £16,000 a month.

Sam is one of at least three robots threatening to replace the traditional brickie. A second, called Hadrian, has been developed in Perth, Western Australia. It has a 90ft telescopic boom mounted on a truck and can build the walls of a standard house in two days, 20 times faster than a human.

And a Swiss-designed robot, the In-Situ Fabricator, uses computer algorithms to help construct unusual buildings.

A report warned last week than ten million British workers – nearly a third of the labour force – could be replaced by robots over the next 15 years.

However, the automatons could help counter a predicted labour shortage in the building trade, with a third of construction workers aged 50 or over and heading for retirement.