Builders can now hire a robot factory by the square metre instead of building their own, with most of them unable to commit to the volumes a fixed prefab plant needs. That is according to Mollie Claypool, co-founder and chief executive of Bristol-based Automated Architecture, or AUAR, who wrote in a recent feature that builders cannot afford “idle machinery on their balance sheets” when the market turns.
“For housing production to scale and respond to demand, capacity must adapt to industry realities rather than forcing the industry to adapt,” Claypool wrote. Big centralised plants, she says, need heavy capital up front and long-term order books that only a small group of high-volume operators can promise.
That matters in the United States, where Claypool estimated from US Census Bureau data that between one million and one-and-a-half million homes are under construction at any one time. She says demand keeps rising as the labour to build those homes declines, whilst the way they are delivered has barely changed in decades.
Set up on a building site in half a day, Claypool says, the micro-factory turns standard timber into wall panels, floor cassettes, and simple roof elements. She wrote that partners pay only for the panel area the robot produces, so that “when production pauses, costs stop”.
Each unit fits inside a 40-foot shipping container and can make the core and shell of a typical home in under eight hours, AUAR says. The company rates each unit at the equivalent of 200 homes per year and says it can be moved to a new site as the builder’s pipeline shifts.
To reserve a unit, builders make a small upfront commitment, which AUAR says is applied to the bill for the panels the robot goes on to produce. European sites can have a unit in a week, the company says, but American sites wait 4 to 6 weeks, depending on location.
AUAR ran three micro-factories across the United States and the European Union in March, with five more due for delivery before the end of the year. Claypool now writes of production across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, with the firm’s own field operators running every unit.
MasterBuilder, the firm’s software, turns a building design into drawings, material take-offs, and robot-ready manufacturing files in under a day, Claypool says. She says a house-type setup can be reused across projects, with changes made almost instantly.
Whilst a micro-factory gives up some of the efficiency of a fixed production line, Claypool says it can lift output where the real constraint is variation between jobs. She says the same unit can switch between products and projects, and can run inside a manufacturer’s existing plant or be sent to a customer’s site.
The firm is also among the partners in a University of Sheffield-led consortium that won European funding to develop on-site robotic micro-factories and climbing robots. Researchers plan to build a two-storey timber pavilion with the robots, then dismantle it so the parts can be reused.
None of this is happening in a vacuum, with some of Britain’s biggest housebuilders choosing instead to own their factories. Vistry and Taylor Wimpey had opened or planned timber-frame plants by last year, with Bellway aiming to use timber in a third of its housing projects by 2030.
As it stands, Rival Holdings, a US investment company focused on the construction industry, says the first American home built with AUAR’s technology is a house in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The robot made the wall panels inside a warehouse in New Haven before they were sent to the Fort Wayne site for crews to assemble the house.
“It’s becoming harder to access skilled labor in the homebuilding process,” said Jerod Hevel, vice president of innovation at Rival Holdings. He said the build tests whether robots and skilled tradespeople can deliver homes faster side by side, and the goal is not to replace workers.
“We’re going to be doing some work in here, but we’re going to make on-site a lot faster,” said Troy Tiernon, who leads the robotic technology at Rival’s lab. He said workers still guide the machine, with Rival splitting its framing labour between the lab and the Fort Wayne building site.
