This Brick Laying Robot looks like it could be a great addition to hand brick laying. Instead of using robots to simply lay bricks that anyone can do this automated process uses robots to make complex patterns which would be very hard to do by hand. As modular construction becomes more popular intricate brick panels could become very common. Just because this example system was done using a very expensive commercial robot that doesn’t mean that it could not be done on the cheap.

Via Brico Geek

"The Gantenbein Winery, in Fläsch, Switzerland, has been the prototype for an entirely new approach to bricklaying: using modified industrial robots. Traditionally, the promise of industrial robots has been that they would replace the human workforce. But these projects, led by the Architecture and Digital Fabrication laboratory at ETH Zürich, demonstrate a different result: architects are free to create designs and patterns of a precision that simply could not be achieved by hand."