Today, manual, paper-based operations are still common in the housing development lifecycle, so updating to digital technologies and processes requires intensive change management, especially considering the many handoffs and the various stakeholders in the process.
Some industry players have learned to adopt tools like BIM, IoT, AI, and robotics, making the difficult transition to reap the rewards, oftentimes seeing these technologies cut time and costs in half.
Construction technology company Procore surveyed more than 1,200 construction decision-makers in its Future State of Construction Report finding that the role of AI and automation to address long-standing inefficiencies is growing. According to the findings, 18% of project time is currently lost to data retrieval, while rework adds up to an additional 28% of wasted effort. More than half of industry leaders (55%) expect automation to disrupt construction practices within five years, as AI continues to evolve and gain adoption.
What that expected disruption means is anyone’s guess, but even leading technology experts in home building are feeling the pressure of the pace of the current technology evolution.
Yudhithisir Gauli is the founder of Framebotix and has a similar career history as many housing technologists. He came from the automotive and aerospace industries that are far ahead of housing on automation and has been working with robots for decades. Now, he wants to solve the global housing crisis, so he is using his experience to train robots for a factory as a service model that can dramatically lower costs.
“Ten years ago, robots were powerful but static,” he says. “They needed manual programming, careful calibration, and could only perform repetitive tasks. They lacked intelligence, adaptability, and the ability to collaborate in dynamic environments.”
Today, the robotic systems at Framebotix are autonomous machines specifically tailored for the construction industry.
“These systems are more than machines—they are intelligent co-workers,” Gauli says. “They fabricate structural panels, assemble volumetric modules, and adjust to design changes in real time, without human intervention.”
He’s excited about the potential of the technology to redesign the construction process. “What once required teams of engineers to program and monitor is now a group of AI-driven robots making their own decisions,” he says. “In Framebotix factories, robots can precisely weld, cut, and assemble, plus they can manage material handling, perform in-line quality checks, and generate traceable digital records for every part they produce.”
This leap forward into the future isn’t always easy for the industry to embrace. Promise Robotics is an AI-powered robotics manufacturing company that is currently vetting builders by their aptitude to embrace change.
“If they have a balance sheet and the capacity but are not motivated to be an early adopter, we can’t work with them,” says Ramtin Attar, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
He compares the automotive industry to his robots.
“It's the same thing,” he says. “You take a complicated task and break it down into repeatable tasks and assign them to a robot. Robots do very simple things over and over again, which also makes the factory very complex. A wall seems simple, but is actually complex. A robot has to incorporate 250 tasks to complete a wall, what tool to use, how do I pick up the pieces, not hit other things, coordinate with other robots, and so on.”
The magic behind making this work is the company’s proprietary AI management system. The AI works to train the robots to generalize timber-based construction and then writes instructions for every part of the process.
The AI-powered process is simple, yet complex. For example, ChatGPT was trained on the internet, but that’s like a chef that knows all the recipes, but has never tasted the food, Attar says.
The Promise Robotics machines can similarly follow commands, like build a wall, and then they can start learning by doing. In its factory, there are only two robots that can perform a variety of tasks, and can take on more complexity, like framing around windows and doors, as long as they have been trained. The training increases when the robots work with wood because the material is more nuanced, such as determining if a nail has penetrated the wood.
Zach Dwiel, is the CEO at Terran Robotics, a company that turns site materials into homes, and uses technology not just for automation but to rethink how we build. He has seen robotics come to the industry within the last 20 years, along with concrete printing, but neither have been effective.
“It started with taking human-centered processes and throwing robots at the problem,” he says. “The other version is scaling up 3D printers and then working on how to squeeze a house through a nozzle. Houses that can be pumped and squeezed through nozzles are not what people want. It’s just a printer for plastic scaled up, and it’s too expensive.”
Terran Robotics worked on ways to use robot capabilities with AI and with the materials. Dwiel discovered that site material could unlock new capabilities and efficiencies.
“By bringing AI and robotics to the construction site, we can automate the process, bring the cost of labor down, and use adobe, a material that is already low cost,” he says. “Not just higher productivity, but the material itself is low cost to unlock and make significant improvements to the quality and cost at the same time.”
Other robotics companies are focused on stick frame construction. He calculates that the automation of stick-built construction can reduce cost and efficiency by a maximum of 50%.
“Concrete is similar and maybe worse,” he said. “It’s more expensive than stick framing in some cases and the printer is not free.”
While 3D printing has its challenges, the research and development going into it is being supported by some of the country’s largest production builders. Lennar is working with 3D technology company Icon, to print 100 homes in Georgetown, Texas.
Haddy, is another 3D printing company with an AI-powered factory hoping to demonstrate that the U.S. can lead in manufacturing, and be sustainable at the same time. The printers use fully recyclable materials to produce products faster, cleaner, and closer to where they’re needed.
Haddy has a future product roadmap that includes modular housing components with 100% recyclable, sustainable materials. It claims to be the world’s largest 3D printing facility with up to six times more output per robot than standard systems.
Framebotix’s robots reduce material waste, energy use, and human error. The factory as a service model used by the company and similar startups localizes production to cut down on the negative impacts of transportation, plus it means fewer factories being set up, operated and torn down, reducing the resources needed and reducing emissions through all of those processes.
Attar from Promise Robotics adds that the process also produces tighter building envelopes, with homes ready for negative 13 degrees Fahrenheit.
Terran Robotics is delivering on other levels.
“One of the impacts of optimizing around human labor is that you end up with long supply chains and you have to burn gas to move things around and build with expensive materials like fiberglass insulation,” Dwiel says. “We remove the constraint of it being easy for a human to install, such as locally sourced straw as insulation, and use material on the job site so you don’t have to ship around the country using high emission manufacturing processes.”
Another benefit of the adobe material is that it naturally regulates humidity and temperature, which has heightened benefits in desert environments. Dwiel suggests that an adobe home will maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity through the entire day, significantly lowering the energy needed to heat and cool.
The walls also have enough thermal mass to effectively act as a thermal battery, which can significantly reduce cost and stress on the grid and make it more profitable for intermittent sources of energy.
“If you have solar panels on the home and sell energy back to the grid, you don’t get paid as much as when you buy it, so you aren’t incentivized to sell it back,” Dwiel says. “So, you just use it to heat your home. But you could store that energy as thermal energy in your walls if they are thermal.”
There is no doubt that digitization is at the root of these companies to leverage the physical robotic assets with AI to optimize design, customization, and construction, and to minimize waste and error.
Terran’s robots use AI for advanced control and 3D vision to constantly scan walls in real time and understand what is needed next, which is important with the material variations in the clay substrate. The robots have to understand the wetness to achieve a targeted quality level.
Promise Robotics also has an operating system that manages purchasing, logistics, automated framing, and structural framing to manage the project from blueprint to final product on one platform. With just a PDF delivered by the builder, Promise can create a home. Attar says the digitization of the process is a massive benefit to the builders and provides huge value.
“When we started the company, long-term vision to bring down price and cycle time by more than 50 or 60% in Canada,” he said. “A single home every day it delays costs $350. We see a future where all the fragmented processes can be done on one table by a robot to minimize what we do on the site.”
The future of construction lies in the fusion of robotics, renewable materials, and intelligent software. Gauli predicts that how Framebotix is already using technology for traceability, AI for adaptive planning, and IoT connectivity for real-time factory coordination will allow them to arrive at that future soon.
Dwiel from Terran Robotics is equally optimistic about the pace of progress.
“I think there is so much that can happen in the next 20 years,” Dwiel says. “Right now, I am focused on building walls. It’s already in code, not inventing anything new to slot into the existing ecosystem. In the course of 20 years, similar kinds of thinking that have a short or nonexistent supply chain will be 80% of the construction of a home. There will be significant decreases in the total cost of the home.”
Another benefit he predicts from this evolution is that homes will have more architectural features that currently are ruled out due to expense.
Attar from Promise Robotics cautions that while robotics are helping the labor shortage, at the same time, skills are becoming more important.
“We don’t talk enough about the trades and their upskilling,” he says. “We hired a master plumber to focus on the future of talent, not just on labor. To participate in the new digital economy, an important ingredient to unlock the future is to bring the skill along.”
It’s not hard to imagine more builders following the path of Terran Robotics. Home builder and consumer respondents in Green Builder Media’s Cognition Smart Data platform share that the number one way they are currently using technology is for cost reductions.
Looking at these innovative companies and bearing witness to the quick pace of change from AI, it’s not hard to imagine we’ll have some mind-blowing changes soon. What twenty years from now looks like for housing, I cannot even imagine.
Publisher’s Note: Green Builder's 20th Anniversary celebration is sponsored by: Carrier, Trex, and Mohawk.