House building robots set to disrupt construction sector
Swedish manufacturer RANDEK has launched the ZeroLabor Robotic System, an automatic production system which can create wooden walls, roofs and floors for building houses according to customer requirements. The system creates the components, checks them for defects and even recycles its own waste. ZeroLabor is considerably more accurate, faster and less wasteful than its more human-reliant counterparts in the industry, leading to speculation that it, and automated systems like it, could soon become the industry norm.

In Sweden, they build homes in factories with workers using sophisticated tools, and now RANDEK is adding robots.

There are many, including this TreeHugger, who think that wood is the best material for building; when sustainably harvested it is a renewable resource that stores carbon for the life of the building. Most of the attention these days is paid to Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), the sexy plywood on steroids; other mass timber products like Nail Laminated and Dowel Laminated timbers are also hot.

But these technologies use a LOT of wood, far more than is actually needed for structural reasons. For many low and mid rise applications it’s overkill. In many ways, wood framing with dimension lumber makes more sense;

the walls are lighter;

the insulation is in the wall rather than outside, so the assemblies can be thinner;

it is far more efficient in its use of materials- the wood goes a lot farther.

We have previously shown how they do it in Sweden, where companies like Lindbäcks Group use precision tools like those made by RANDEK to crank out wall panels for their flat-packed multiple family buildings, or in Canada where Great Gulf H+me Technology is building houses; In the States, Unity Homes, Ecocor and Katerra are doing it;

Here come the robots

The video above shows how it works for H+me Technology (Formerly Brockport) in Milton, Ontario, just west of Toronto. It’s pretty automated but you still see a lot of people running around placing 2x6s in jigs. But maybe not for long; RANDEK has just launched its ZeroLabor Robotic System, which they describe as: