building automation AI and robotic arms flex new tech muscles to boost lagging home construction in Canada
Entrepreneurs adapting robotic arms to help contend with country's housing shortage
James Dunne · CBC News
· Ramtin Attar is CEO of Promise Robotics, part of a small group of Canadian companies and researchers working on technology to help homebuilders catch up with innovation in other industries. He believes robotic arms and artificial intelligence will help Canada do a better job of meeting homebuilding targets. (David Bajer/CBC ) Ramtin Attar is standing inside an unremarkable warehouse, in an ordinary-looking industrial park near Edmonton's airport, looking at some robots he believes could be revolutionary for the construction business.
Attar is the CEO and co-founder of Promise Robotics — part of a small group of Canadian companies and researchers working on technology to help homebuilders catch up with innovation in other industries.
In front of him, a set of four robotic arms, like those found in auto plants, are assembling the walls, floors and roofs of houses.
Using artificial intelligence (AI), the arms are reading blueprints and, in a sense, thinking for themselves about what cuts to make, what pieces to nail together and where holes need to be drilled for wires and plumbing.
"So they can sort of on the fly decide what is the tool I need to use, what is the sequence of tasks I need to do," Attar said.
It's a pretty radical concept for an industry that experts say needs a serious upgrade in order to confront a shortage of skilled labour and a dire need for new housing during an affordability crisis in Canada.
"There's a big disparity between the construction industry and the other industries leveraging AI and robotics," said Daeho Kim, who researches robotic construction as an assistant professor in civil engineering at the University of Toronto.
WATCH | Robot arms muscle in on building homes in Canada:
How robots and AI could help ease Canada’s housing crisis
As Canada struggles with a severe housing shortage and affordability crisis, some companies hope to speed up construction with AI and robots that can cut building times in half. Playing catch-up
While the industry has new high-tech building materials and can put up a fancy smart home, many parts of construction — not just detailed finish work — still involve old-fashioned manual labour.
According to a recent report from consulting giant McKinsey & Company, the global $12-trillion architecture, engineering and construction business has been "among the slowest to digitize and innovate."
Canada's industry has been a "laggard," Attar said, adding that the country needs "a massive productivity increase" in order to hit homebuilding targets set by the federal and provincial governments.
He's talking about the gap between the 3.87 million new homes needed by 2031 and how many are being built every year in Canada.
It's a complicated problem tied to housing policy, multiple levels of government regulation, infrastructure costs and a shortage of construction workers forecast to continue for years.
But Attar said he believes technology can significantly reduce how long the construction of houses, apartments and condos takes.
How the robotic arms work and think
Attar said his company is developing AI for construction to master some of "the physical tasks that previously were really just the domain of a human."
Instead of creating single-function robots and pre-programming them to do highly specific tasks, Promise Robotics bought "off-the-shelf" robotic arms, began programming its own AI on construction skills and trained the arms to make parts of houses.
These robotic arms adapted from manufacturing are being used to put together the wall of a house inside the Promise Robotics factory in Edmonton. The arms can operate automatically thanks to AI. (David Bajer/CBC) Since starting in 2019 and raising $25 million, Attar said the company has created a "foundational brain" that can scan building plans and make decisions about the fastest way to build parts of a house or multi-unit dwelling.
Able to adjust and make several different types of walls, floors and roofs, the arms are different from many larger machines in huge factories that make prefabricated homes.
While Attar is a tech guy who spent years working at Autodesk — which creates software for such industries as engineering, construction and manufacturing — his company's co-founder, Reza Nasseri, has decades of construction experience and started one of Canada's largest pre-fab homebuilding companies, Edmonton-based ACQBuilt.
Unlike ACQBuilt's multimillion-dollar factory, the Promise Robotics system is highly portable and can be set up in warehouse-type spaces anywhere for much less money. That's attracting a lot of interest from homebuilders, Attar said.
Workers install roof sheets on a home in Bradford, Ont., in March 2024. Canada is facing a shortage of construction labourers, and some companies are using robotics to help solve the problem. (Patrick Morell/CBC) Curious builders crunching numbers
After being completed, the walls, floors and roof are sent to the building site, where it takes about a day for workers to assemble the home, complete with windows, doors and stairs, using a crane.
The company says it can cut the total time it takes to build a house to about five months, which is about half the typical length, according to government data.
Attar said the company already has a builder in Edmonton as a client and that more than 20 others from across Canada visited Promise Robotics in 2024, intrigued by the possibility that setting up a temporary facility with robotic arms near their developments could double their production.
Kevin Lee, CEO of the Canadian Home Builders' Association, said most construction companies are just too small to spend money on developing their own technology, but "robotics, if they can be done in a cost-effective way, start to become very interesting."
Taking robotic arms to a building site
While Promise Robotics' AI-powered arms work in a factory-like setting, another company has developed a robotic arm that can work on-site.
Toronto-based Horizon Legacy describes its robotic arm, Val 2.0, as a portable 3D printer that pours a special concrete mix to form the walls of a house.
The company's CEO, Nhung Nguyen, said that "we don't have enough people to build all the things that we need to build," talking about its projects and the big picture in Canada.
Horizon Legacy CEO Nhung Nguyen, left, and worker Zayed Elbadri are shown with the company's cement-pouring robotic arm, Val 2.0, at a housing project site in Gananoque, Ont., where the arm was being tested in October 2024. (Joviss Visuals/Horizon Legacy ) The company spent three years and a few million dollars developing Val 2.0, which recently finished pouring the walls for a 26-unit housing project in Gananoque, Ont., a small town three hours east of Toronto.
Nguyen said their walls provide better insulation and their crew of five people is half the size of a regular cement crew on a housing job.
Mounted on a trailer, the arm is controlled not by AI but by a human with a joystick.
Nguyen said the arm takes the heavy lifting and dirty work out of this part of construction, something she hopes will attract new workers to the field.
"We want to bring young people back into construction," she said. "We want to elevate the standards in construction, and we're going to use technology as a tool to do that."
Both Horizon Legacy and Promise Robotics say that while robots will help ease the construction labour shortage, there are plenty of opportunities for workers to continue in roles that require more dexterity than robots can offer, and to "upskill" for jobs guiding or managing robotic devices.
Other advances and robots to come
Arms aren't the only way robots are moving into construction.
At the University of British Columbia's Smart Structures Lab, civil engineering professor Tony Yang is working on turning conventional cranes, excavators and loaders used in construction today into robots by equipping them with all kinds of sensors and connecting them by a wireless signal to a computer.
Tony Yang, a civil engineering professor at the University of British Columbia, is working on converting cranes, excavators and loaders used in construction today into autonomous robots. (Clare Kiernan) On-site tests have already been done with Bird Construction in Richmond, B.C., where cranes and forklifts move heavy materials around guided by AI, not by workers using a remote control.
Yang said the technology is similar to self-driving cars and will be "the next generation robot you will start seeing in the construction sites," possibly within 10 years.
But Lee of the homebuilders' association said policy and regulatory changes are what's most needed to get more houses built more quickly.
Back in Edmonton, Attar of Promise Robotics said he hopes Canadian companies will lead "an industry-scale transformation that not only we can benefit from, but we can actually take to the rest of the world."