SAM

In 2013, a robot called SAM correctly laid bricks at a demonstration site. 

Nate Podkaminer, who held a degree in architecture, worked for an established construction firm that built factories, hospitals and other large structures. His job was to keep projects moving forward, despite inevitable delays. But, in 1996, he also started thinking of ways to modernize masonry. A decade later, while visiting his daughter Torrey in Rochester, NY, he started talking to her date (and future husband), engineer Scott Peters, about the potential of a bricklaying machine.

Peters bought into the dream of developing the world’s first bricklaying machine, and he and Podkaminer co-founded a company to pursue that dream. In 2013, Peters demonstrated a contraption that laid part of a brick wall at a construction site in Victor, New York. 

Mortar slowly leaked from the machine, which featured a large steel cabinet hiding a web of wires. Fifty seconds elapsed before its big robotic arm picked up its first brick, “buttered” it – spread mortar on it – then placed it and returned for the next brick. Fifty seconds is ...