a start-up develops a robotic arm to speed up house construction

With its technology, aptly named BotBuilt – built by a robot in French – this company hopes to help fight the housing shortage in the United States.

Will robots replace masons? There is a housing shortage in the United States, as in much of the world. Interest rates have risen since the pandemic to combat inflation. So buying a house or apartment is very expensive. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median salary for a household capable of purchasing a home rose last year from $88,000 to $107,000. The number of homeless Americans is estimated to exceed 600,000.

Barrett Ames, a student at Duke, a renowned university in North Carolina, realized the problem when he bought a remodeling house with his wife and saw how much work lay ahead. He said that technology could offer solutions when there is a huge need for the construction of new housing. So with his partners, he launched BotBuilt in 2020. BotBuilt has two assets, Axl and Slash, like Axl Rose, the singer and Slash, the guitarist of the hardrock band Guns N’Roses. Two robotic arms of one ton each capable of working wood.

In the United States, houses are generally built with wood rather than bricks as in France. There is a lot of carpentry work to be done since the wood will serve as the structure of the house. It is this structure that Axl and Slash will manufacture in the factory by assembling the floor, walls and roof. A bit like on a car assembly line. No more need to carry out this essential step by hand, which sometimes presents a risk for workers. Not to mention the human errors which will slow down the construction site.

A technology that allows you to do without certain workers

“Machines are better than us at math, that’s how it is”, says one of the founders of BotBuilt to the Techxplore site. And as long as the foundations of the house are not laid, not much can happen on the site, hence the potential financial gains. Faster, more reliable, cheaper. According to the company, all you have to do is program these arms so that they assemble the boards and beams as indicated in the plans. For these robotic arms, assembly would be as easy as putting together an Ikea piece of furniture, according to BotBuilt.

The start-up is valued at $35 million. Last year, one of the three founders was named by Forbes magazine as one of 30 entrepreneurs under 30 to watch. And indeed, BotBuilt technology makes it possible to do without certain workers on the site. But the company only works with around ten manufacturers for the moment. And the argument of its creators is that there aren’t enough workers available to meet market demand anyway, so BotBuilt wouldn’t take anyone’s work. The company aims within five years to exist on the global market and not just in the United States.