[+] Aussie Robot Brickie Armed and Ready in High-Stakes US Test

Hadrian X, the West Australian-built 30-tonne robotic bricklaying machine, is sitting on Florida’s Gulf Coast as we speak, with nearly 20 years of hopes, dreams, research and development resting on its 32m telescopic boom. After a two-month sea journey from Fremantle to Brunswick in Georgia, the 14-wheel truck was transported 580km to a testing site at Fort Myers late last month, where it’s now undergoing an engineering assessment. Once that’s completed, site acceptance testing will begin in earnest for Hadrian X and FBR—the Perth-based publicly traded developer of the machine. Hadrian will then be asked to work with US builders to construct 5-10 Florida homes. And after that? According to the deal FBR has with the Irish construction materials giant Consolidated Rock Holdings (CRH), it will trigger an option for an initial tranche of 20 Hadrian autonomous bricklaying vehicles—the first four to be delivered within 12 months. CRH Investments, the company’s funding arm, has an eventual option for 300 vehicles. Each valued at between $2 million and $2.5 million. For Mark Pivac—an aeronautical engineer and the inventor of Hadrian X—the past 19 years has been one hell of a ride. He saw the future … and the future is now. ▲ Aeronautical engineer Mark Pivac and Hadrian X. The journey began for the former Flying Officer with a love of windsurfing in the early 90s when stationed at RAAF Base Pearce, in Perth’s northern suburbs. When out of uniform, he began designing Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) machines that would build him better, more accurate fins. Not for the Italian-built Macchi training jets he looked after at the airbase, but the fins on his sailboards. “And I had this idea that you could combine the optical technology from the surveying world (his father was a mining surveyor) with computer-controlled machinery to build something to do these shaping tasks,” Pivac says. Soon he was designing custom CNCs for boat building, then cabinet-making and the pattern-making industry. But the 2000s in Australia will be remembered for surging commodity prices and closer trade links to China. Western Australia was in the middle of a mining boom, and by 2005 a surge in building had followed. By his own admission, Pivac googled “bricklaying”, and learned from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that 1.5 billion bricks get laid in Australia each year. Even better, he learned bricklayers were getting paid $1.50 a brick. Finally, some numbers that stack up Finally, he thought, some commercial numbers that actually stack up. And that year he lodged his first patent application, for an automated bricklaying system, using ground-mounted robots and mortar. “And naively, I thought I’d be able to come up with a machine in about a year and we’d been in business,” Pivac tells The Urban Developer in a phone call from Florida. It would be another 11 years before his prototype, Hadrian 105— named after the Roman emperor who built a defensive wall across northern England—would build the world’s first multi-room block structure from a 3D computer-aided design model. With no human intervention. Five years later FBR had the block-laying robot build its first two-storey house-like structure—using rebar, reinforced concrete pillars and a suspended slab—at the company’s headquarters in the foothills west of Perth. As the year drew to a close, Hadrian X was driven 30km south-west to Willagee, where FBR began work building the load-bearing walls, internal partition walls and the concrete footings and slabs for 16 townhouses. ▲ What you see on the outside is a fraction of what’s going on in that boom arm. Seventeen months later, in May last year, FBR announced to the Australian Securities Exchange the fourth generation of Hadrian X had laid US-format cement masonry blocks at a sustained rate of more than 300 an hour, smashing the previous record of its older brother, Hadrian 109. That’s about 10 times faster than a human bricklayer. “And here we are, 19 years later, and we’ve sort of perfected the technology,” Pivac, now the company’s executive director and chief technology officer, says from his hotel room. “And yeah, we’re sort of in the process of launching it to the world market now.” Proving the technology works Hadrian X’s 32m telescopic arm can lay blocks within 50mm of existing walls. A nozzle on the arm squirts a special construction adhesive, instead of traditional mortar, to each block as it’s laid. FBR says it cures in about 45 minutes and is stronger than traditional mortar and, regardless, it was an important prerequisite to being able to build in the US. And the claw on the arm is guided by motion sensors following a digital blueprint and can auto-correct its position 1000 times a second. “There’s some interesting things about bringing a new technology like this to market,” Pivac says. “You have to prove, first of all, that the technology works and then you have to prove that it’s commercially viable. “We’ve done that in Australia.” Now he’s testing in the US—the biggest free market in the world and currently facing a shortage of about 4.5 million homes, according to the real estate website Zillow. And that’s not without challenges. While the Besser concrete block is generally of universal size, Americans use imperial measure which means a difference of a couple of millimetres. FBR’s first weeks in Florida have been spent making slight adjustments to the grippers on the end of the arm as well as the vision systems that handle the blocks through the boom. FBR counts 143 patents for Hadrian and associated peripherals, with another 107 pending. One of those is for Hadrian’s secret through-boom delivery system. “You know, what people see on the outside is a fraction of what goes on, on the inside,” Pivac says. “There’s a mechanical side to the machine, which is that big robotic arm, and that moves fairly slowly. “But because it’s so long, it gets a bit of bounce in it…it’s affected by the wind and all that sort of thing, to the point where by itself, it couldn’t lay a brick very accurately. Patents pending “So, we have a laser tracker which measures the position and orientation of the end of that beam very accurately. And at that end we have a very fast, very dynamic robot, which does the actual bricklaying. “[But] it also compensates for any movement in that big boom.” They call it Dynamic Stabilisation Technology (DST). Pivac won’t discuss it any further, other than to concede it’s got “a huge, huge range of applications”. But imagine for a minute, a machine that can handle a diverse range of products through a boom system that can telescope and articulate, slew and bend on its joints, while enabling an onboard robot to access all parts of a workspace? Autonomously. FBR has patents for that too. Nor will Pivac go into detail about the concept designs they have that will allow the next generation of Hadrian to be crane-mounted rather than truck-mounted. Hadrian can build a skyscraper. Nineteen years ago Pivac counted a staff of five. Today his total engineering and construction team is about 105. Most of those are optical engineers, mechanical engineers, mechatronics engineers and computer scientists. “Fortunately, Western Australia has a pretty good engineering industry which supports the mining and agriculture and shipbuilding industries,” he says, “and we also have in place a very good global supply chain.” However, under a memorandum-of-understanding with Liebherr-Mischtechnik GmbH, it is likely the German heavy equipment manufacturer will now produce the autonomous bricklaying trucks for the world. With an immediate focus on the US. “We’ve got limited capacity so we’ve really got to go with where the market is,” Pivac says. “CRH is very keen and the US market is the place to be so we’re concentrating on that first. “It’s a bit of a balancing act, you know. “We could be pulled in 100 different directions but we know that we have to get something out to market and get something which is cashflow positive for us.” ▲ The claw on Hadrian’s arm is guided by motion sensors following a digital blueprint and can auto-correct its position 1000 times a second. You are currently experiencing The Urban Developer Plus (TUD+), our premium membership for property professionals. Click here to learn more.

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