That looks perfect! 
A team of humans charge $15 - $20 a sheet to hang drywall in way more complicated situations, and can do about 100 sheets on a good day. Good luck putting your expensive and presumably heavy drywall robot on some janky planking over a stairwell or other irregular space the way drywall installers routinely do on like, any job with stairs. We also mostly use 12’ x 4’ or even 12’ x 54” sheets which require 2 humans to install nowadays. Saves on taping and mudding, which is the bulk of the cost of drywall. We’re clearly a very long way from robots coming anywhere close to beating those prices, adaptabiity or speed. The human body coupled with the human mind, running on a fuel as simple and plentiful as food and water is actually a pretty damned amazing machine.
Comin’ after those blue collar tweekers’ jobs…
That works if you already have a crane. I dunno - around here, they deliver the drywall with a boom truck and then drive off. So there would be no crane there for when the job was done.
Yeah, but it’s got a massive bumcrack. — Hell, it’s all bumcrack.
Seems to me it would make more sense to make drywall obsolete than drywall hangers. How about a 3D printed house? It’s like they don’t know we know they are really war machines. I remember a 70s era comic book when I was a kid which began with humans playing chess while robot soldiers fought a permanent war below. I even remember the last line of the story, “We’ll see how long this war lasts with humans doing the fighting”
Fractal robots are my favorite. You build robot bricks, as small as possible. Each brick has locomotion, data and power. The design for the building is distributed to a pile of bricks, which self organize to complete the structure.
edit: though Bruce Sterling had a different idea in his novel Distraction. Building materials are distributed with small chips which can talk to people near them. The chips say things like hi, I am a brick, please put some mortar on that brick over there and put me down on top of it, and so on.
I’m disappointed that the nail gun isn’t built into the robot. It would be much more scary if it was. I mean, that’s what they’re trying to achieve, right?
Yeah, but how much of the future building work is creating new builds from scratch vs. re-adapting existing structures for new purposes? For the sake of the planet I hope the latter will dominate.
Completely agree with the drywall hangers and ME’s up thread; that is not a “drywall-installing robot”, it’s a robot installing drywall.
I have mixed feelings about human shaped robots. There’s an argument to be made that a robot shaped like a person will be well suited to navigate human-adapted environments, but human-adapted environments (like humans) aren’t always that well suited to narrow task behaviors.
At best, humans are a moderately successful solution to the problem of living on earth. In automation, as in nature, we are overmatched by niche-specific designs.
I was listening to a podcast recently (forget which one) and they pointed out that labor used to have a huge problem with being exploited. Now, labor is becoming expendable and unnecessary and that’s even worse.
We sure live in interesting times.
Call me when there’s one that can clean and organize my apartment, do my laundry and ironing and make me a cup of coffee- maybe dinner.
There’s a robot apocalypse coming, but it’s likely not going to result in the loss of billions of human lives. Rather, it’s our Capitalism that is at stake.
I was thinking the same, that using a robot designed with the human form in mind is a huge waste of efficiency. You can build a larger construction robot that didn’t look human that can perform the job with more speed and accuracy. It’d probably end up being more robust too.
Needs more ass crack, not enough ass crack…
So where’s the home version that can cook, clean, do chores, brew beer and garden?
Surely a bipedal/humanoid form is not the most efficient for this scenario…
Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!
As @Faffenreffer pointed out upthread, a robot shaped like a person will be well suited to navigate human-adapted environments and use human-adapted tools, so there’s a natural design goal for a general purpose construction robot to be able to fit through doors and windows and stairwells and use expensive existing tools and equipment.
But when the robot is twice as heavy as a human it’s not really meeting that goal. Real construction workers often need to walk on some pretty suboptimal footing!
