Plant Equipment and Hire February 2018 | Page 25

TECHNOLOGY W hether you believe in a utopian future of robots and man working side-by-side in harmony, or envision a more Matrix-style future controlled by robot over- lords, one thing we cannot deny is that the future is getting closer every day. Rapid technological advancement is already having a significant impact on the mining and construction industries, with the fields of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) being of particular note. However, another area that is receiving less attention at the moment, primarily because it is still in the research phase and not yet ready to deploy on the ground, is the field of robotics. There are already robots working in factories, of course. But these new robots are of a more interactive type than those which can be programmed to carry out a single repetitive task at high speed and with precision. Then there are machines such as the one-armed bricklaying robot from Australian company Fastbrick Robotics. The USD2-million Hadrian X requires minimal human interaction and works day and night, laying up to 1 000 bricks an hour. The company’s first construction robot, the Hadrian 105, successfully completed the first block printed structure from a mobile base 20 meters away in 2015. FEBRUARY 2018 23