Robotics: Standards For Future Homes

Robotics: Standards For Future Homes

AUAR’s automated micro-factories deliver homes based on a building block system.

As resistant as the housing industry has been to adopt new technology, some innovations are breaking through the barrier. From the actual home construction all the way to operations and user experience, every part of the home experience is being touched by technology and automation.

Through that technology and automation, housing can become productized and be delivered faster. Not only that, but homes can be delivered at a higher quality, with better performance, and with longer-term resiliency features.

These three innovative companies are bringing automation to the forefront and championing this new level of housing.

Speeding The Process With Robotics

The name of the game is speed to solve the current housing crisis. So, new approaches to automation and robotics are bringing new homes online faster than ever before.

Mollie Claypool, founder and CEO at Automated Architecture, or AUAR for short, has created a micro-factory for producing a programmable pixel building block that can produce 10 homes per month, and reduce labor costs by up to 60%.

AUAR’s patented design to manufacturing and assembly system programs robots to use one pixel in several different ways in the construction of timber homes.

“The building blocks of all automation is code, so we thought, why don’t we have a building system that is designed like a bit,” Claypool said. “AUAR’s building block sits at the core of our tech stack and can be best understood as a volumetric pixel or ‘voxel,’ or in layman’s terms, as a Lego. The building block can uniquely be used for floors, walls, and roofs. It is different because it is based on a computational reading of what building blocks need to be.”

An AUAR micro-factory has a single robotic cell that can build many types of the same building block and the complimentary tech stack can be licensed to partners like a contractor, home builder, offsite manufacturer, or developer. The micro-factory can fit into a shipping container-sized box, is priced at just $312,000 so it can provide a payback in 6 weeks if used at full capacity, and it can produce about 100 homes per year.

“It lowers the threshold for robotic adoption because typically it’s a long set up and a long pay off with big upfront capital investment,” she said. “We have one micro-factory operational now, and are currently onboarding three more in Belgium, the U.S., and the U.K.”

Source: Forbes