What bricklaying has taught Monumental about robots in construction

Monumental’s Pisa robot, which is in charge of laying bricks and mortar. | At the same time, the U.S.

is short 4.5 million homes. Developers like Monumental are betting on robots to help bridge this gap. Construction’s labor issues will only continue to get worse, assuming the current trends continue. More and more people are retiring from the industry, while fewer young people are interested in getting into it. Salar al Khafaji, the founder and CEO of Monumental, believes construction’s labor shortage presents a unique opportunity for robotics. “Construction is a really interesting use case for robots and AI, because it’s one of the few industries where the narrative is really not AI and robots coming in to replace labor to make things cheaper or redundant,” al Khafaji told The Robot Report. “It’s literally there’s not enough people to do the work. We desperately need this technology.” Monumental is developing a fleet of robots that can handle construction tasks. The company decided to start with bricklaying for two main reasons. The first is because bricklaying is difficult work, said al Khafaji. He said he believes if the team can automate this task, it can likely take on a range of other tasks on a construction site. The second reason goes back to labor. “If you look at Western Europe, bricklayers are literally the No. 1 job-shortage category in multiple countries, like the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany,” al Khafaji said. The three stages of construction, and where robotics is seeing traction You can break down the construction process of a typical home into three major stages, al Khafaji said.