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If the idea of humans working alongside construction robots seems so "next century," meet SAMIOO, a bricklaying robot being readied to enter the construction market next year.
SAM stands for Semi-Automated Mason, and is the brainchild of Construction Robotics in Victor, N.Y.
The company's co-founders are Nathan Podkaminer, an architect and construction project manager and Scott L. Peters, an expert in robotics and advanced manufacturing technologies.
"We've been working on the design since 2007," said operations manager Zak Podkaminer.
"We started with the basics - laying brick and putting mortar on a brick."
The company's goal was to build a robot agile enough to apply mortar to a brick, accurate enough to set the brick, light enough to be supported by a standard mast climbing system and agile enough to move back and forth along the wall face.
"The human brain is incredible and it's challenging to replicate accurately what a bricklayer does," said Podkaminer.
"A human bricklayer adjusts instantaneously for wind, other workers on the scaffold and other conditions. It took us two years just to perfect SAM's ability to extrude mortar onto a brick."
However, robots excel at exacting, repetitive tasks over long stretches of time. Substituting a laser beam for a string line, SAM follows a CAD design, allowing precise placement of each brick...