Building a house by robot. Image: Supplied.

One of Australia’s largest brick businesses Brickworks, has announced a joint venture with West Australian startup Fast Brick Robotics (FBR) to test the Hadrian X bricklaying machine.

The joint venture between the two creates a business called Fastbrick Australia, replacing an earlier memorandum of understanding, and will deliver what they call “a wall as a service” — where businesses pay for the Hadrian X to build a wall for them.

Under the terms of the deal, Brickworks will provide blocks for the Hadrian X machine, while FBR will have exclusive rights to supply laying services to Fastbrick Australia with their Hadrian X machines.

FBR CEO Mike Pivac in a statement to the ASX said they were “very pleased” with the joint venture.

“Fastbrick Australia provides FBR with an opportunity in Australia to demonstrate the capabilities of the Hadrian X with the new optimised blocks,” he said.

Brickworks managing director Lindsay Partridge AM said, in that same statement, he was “pleased” to be working with FBR and was hopeful to “test the commercialisation of Wall as a Service”.

The deal comes reasonably soon after a previous memorandum of understanding between FBR and US construction giant Caterpillar Inc died in December last year.

The Hadrian X is reported to require minimal human interaction, capable of laying up to 1,000 bricks an hour — about the output of two human bricklayers for a day – with no needs for breaks.

Last year, the same robot built a house in three days.

In 2017 the company signed a non-binding memorandum with Saudi Arabia to potentially use the Hadrian X’s to build 50,000 in the Kingdom by 2022. About 100 robots are reported to be needed to do this.

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