Starting this summer, there will be a new contender in homebuilding in Alberta—and it uses robots.
Promise Robotics is opening a new 60,000-square-foot warehouse in Calgary where robots will create modular panels for housing. Promise calls the facility and technology its “Homebuilding Factory-as-a-Service” (FaaS) platform.
Pro Builder Business recently interviewed Promise Robotics co-founder and CEO Ramtin Attar, a former architect and Autodesk employee, about the opportunity. Which is, according to press releases, simply to “deliver homes faster with significantly fewer resources.”
“I spent 13 years at Autodesk (a software company that developed AutoCAD software),” Attar told us. “This industry has been building homes the same way for a century. The labour shortages, the escalating cost, and the supply needed is going to put a lot of pressure on this industry.”
Attar’s co-founder in the venture is Reza Nasseri, a homebuilder. Attar describes Nasseri this way: “He has committed his entire life to advancing construction and homebuilding.”
“I said, ‘Reza, how do you think we can make this accessible to the rest of the industry?’ We need foundational innovation in space [industry],” Attar said. “We raised investments and we started building our artificial intelligence model for construction.”
Promise Robotic uses the same robots that are used in auto plants. “It’s a commodity, it’s off the shelf, the costs keep coming down,” Attar said. “Right now, the cost of that robot in automotive plants is about 30 cents an hour.”
“We take the same thing, we add the construction belt tool to it, and a Promise Robotics brain.”
“In automotive, you’ve got five players that basically produce every single car in the world. So they’re highly motivated. Whereas the construction industry is highly fragmented.
“What [we] have done is to say, we can actually get robots to not care what they’re building. And essentially advance enough to build highly variable things.”
Promise Robotics’ Calgary plant will be able to produce up to 1,000,000 square feet of housing annually, fabricating modular panels, Attar said. The new plant is building on the success of Promise Robotics’ factory in Edmonton.
