The occasion of the open home is probably a good time to repost...

The occasion of the open home is probably a good time to repost this video transcript from last year:

Hi I’m Mark Pivac, CTO at FBR. It’s Wed 23rd Sept, 2020. I’m here today to give you a little bit of an update on what’s been happening out at Dayton, which is really exciting for us with our first display home build.

The builders have been progressing since FBR left the site. The external face brick skin demonstrates how a brick product can be built around the robotically laid product. The external face brick was laid manually, and this shows how traditional manual bricklayers can demonstrate their artisan skill, whilst working in with the productivity and heavy lifting advantages of robotic construction for the structural internal walls of a building.

So, the Dayton building has all the usual features you’d find on a house in WA, such as carports, a drop down slab, windows, doors and all that sort of stuff installed. The roof was actually done with a truss system manufactured off site and that’s not commonly done on brick buildings in WA, usually because by the time the brickwork gets to the cap height, it’s not really accurate enough to work well with the truss system. So, the truss manufacturers were a little bit concerned about us ordering a truss system straight off the drawings, but after our bricklaying they came out and checked it all out and were really happy with the site, and they built the trusses exactly to the drawings rather than as built measurements, and they manufactured those trusses for our next build out at Byford actually in parallel to the bricklaying process, so that as soon as the bricklaying was completed, the trusses were simply brought to site and placed without any on site measurements being taken prior to the manufacture of the trusses.

So, this really shows how Hadrian can be used to speed up the building process. What it means is the building sequence goes from being an entirely serial process where everybody is dependent on the previous task happening to more of a manufacturing and assembly process, where the manufacture of different components can all happen in parallel, and then the building is actually more a simple assembly process.

We’ve also had the advantage of being able to show a few local builders through the building, so they can get an understanding of how robotic and manual construction can work together. This is really exciting for us. Of course, there is quite a lead time from when a builder has a look at a new way of doing things and when they can actually incorporate that into work for a client or themselves and get it through the whole building process, so we’ll keep you informed as that progresses, but what’s really positive is that quite a few different builders have come out and have really liked what they see, and definitely see a future for construction robotics in WA.

We’ve also been planning for some 2 storey builds, and also some overseas builds for seismic areas where we can integrate concrete columns. We’ve been through the planning and engineering phases of those and we’ll be doing demonstration builds here to show that Hadrian can build not just in stable sand environments like WA, but also in seismic rated areas, where 2 things work in our favour. The bricks are actually bonded together. That of course makes them quite a bit more seismic resistant than a conventional mortar joint, and also we’re able to built up form work for the concrete pillars out of bricks if the buildings need the additional strength of reinforced concrete. So, we’ll be demonstrating that coming up, and also a rapid construction 2 storey technique, where well be laying the first layer of blocks, and then installing a pre-cast concrete slab on top of those blocks as the floor for the second storey and then laying blocks on top of that, so that’s pretty exciting, and we’re just progressing through the final details of that and that will be coming up soon.