Company now set to launch robot-powered modular housing factory
MELBOURNE: Churning out six houses a day and a wall every ten minutes, the most advanced robo-housing hub is about to be launched.
Adelaide will soon be home to a team of robots capable of building six houses a day, as a launch date nears for the country’s most advanced automated housing manufacturer.
The 14 German robots are en route by ship to 5North’s factory at Edinburgh in the city’s north, where the operations will be based.
The factory’s rate of producing the structural elements of a house – equal to six houses a day or more than 2000 a year – will be dramatically faster than the average build time for a conventional home in Australia, estimated by Master Builders to be 55 weeks.
5North founder and chief executive Wayne Hughes said the houses were expected to be available to the market by August, following the arrival, installation, commissioning and testing of the robots, made by German company KUKA.
He said he planned to expand nationally in the near future by opening factories in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.
The machines would process raw materials – mostly timber – to produce a wall or panel every 10 minutes. The element would then be moved to another section of the factory for the addition of extras such as insulation, glass windows and doors.
During a 7.5 hour shift, the robots could produce the structural elements of six 120sq m houses – the walls, floors and ceilings – to be delivered to a site for additional “wet” works such as painting, tiling and waterproofing.
The robots are set to work across six stations, manning a factory line about 120m-long, approaching Adelaide Oval’s length of 167m.
The process would be overseen by about 30 human manufacturing operatives.
It is set to be the first factory of its kind in South Australia and one of the most advanced in the world.
“One of our reasons for investing in robots, was we wanted robots to do the heavy lifting and the repetitive tasks. We want humans here to do the thinking,” Mr Hughes said.
“The line can produce a panel (that can) weigh up to 1.5 tonnes. We’ve then got mechanical solutions in place by way of overhead crane … that don’t require humans to do heavy lifting at all.
“If you think about a traditional construction site, there’s quite a lot of heavy lifting and that creates risk of injury. We can engineer a lot of that risk out in a factory environment.”
He said the majority of the timber would come from mills in Mount Gambier.
The company’s marketing materials stress 5North is not a builder but a supplier, while focusing on its contribution to housing supply, using the slogan: “Everyone deserves an address”.
Damien Crough, executive chairman at prefabAUS, said the factory would make greater use of robotics than comparable facilities in the country.
“Bringing that level of automation and robotics into the Australian market is significant. That’s where the future is – we’re going to see productivity gains and cost decreases in construction,” he said.
“Why are we still building on site conventionally when we’ve got this sort of technology available to us?
“You look at automotive, you look at aerospace, they moved to automation decades ago. In construction, we’re the opposite – our costs go up and our productivity goes down.”