Where has Construction Automation been successful?
Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful?Brian PotterSep 11, 20261292016ShareConstruction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Unsurprisingly, there’s long been interest in automating the construction process to reduce the amount of labor required, and therefore the cost of housing. To do this, I used AI to trawl through thousands of old issues of digitized construction trade journals going back to the 19th century, looking for any example of a construction task being automated.My main takeaway is that successful construction automation basically falls into two categories.
- ▪Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful?Brian PotterSep 11, 20261292016ShareConstruction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to a
- ▪Unsurprisingly, there’s long been interest in automating the construction process to reduce the amount of labor required, and therefore the cost of housing.
- ▪To do this, I used AI to trawl through thousands of old issues of digitized construction trade journals going back to the 19th century, looking for any example of a construction task being automated.My main takeaway is that successful const
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (Front Page) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.construction-physics.com/p/where-has-construction-automation |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:13:52 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T14:56:51.338Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T14:56:51.338Z |
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Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful?Brian PotterSep 11, 20261292016ShareConstruction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Unsurprisingly, there’s long been interest in automating the construction process to reduce the amount of labor required, and therefore the cost of housing. The earliest attempt at automating construction I’m aware of dates to 1853, with a plastering machine invented by Isaac Hussey, and since then there have been numerous other attempts.Hussey’s plastering machine, via Scientific American, February 5, 1853.I wanted to get a better sense of what the arc of construction automation looks like over time:…
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