What Bricklaying Taught Monumental About Construction Robots

According to the Association of General Contractors, 92% of contractors struggle to fill construction roles, while the U.S. faces a shortage of 4.5 million homes. Monumental CEO Salar al Khafaji sees this as an opportunity for robotics, noting that the industry lacks workers, not because AI is replacing them, but because there aren't enough people to do the work.

Monumental focuses on bricklaying for two reasons: it's physically demanding, and bricklayers are the No. 1 shortage job in Western Europe (UK, Netherlands, Germany). Al Khafaji believes mastering bricklaying will enable the company to handle other construction tasks.

Construction has three stages: ground preparation, shell building, and finishing. Ground prep already has many autonomous players (Bedrock, Gravis, etc.), while Monumental targets the shell phase for brick and block work. Finishing has seen little robotics interest, with Canvas Robotics acquired earlier this year.

Monumental built three robots: Pisa (bricklaying), Petra (brick transport), and Panama (mortar supply). Al Khafaji says material handling is crucial, and the common platform means only 10% of tech is bricklaying-specific. The team uses Pathion for site communication.

The construction industry is fragmented; Monumental acts as a subcontractor with robots. This avoids deep integration but creates dependencies; missing bricks can halt work. Other firms like Reframe Systems use microfactories to build homes differently.

Deployments have taught Monumental valuable lessons. A computer vision model failed to recognize pitch-black bricks, requiring retraining with real-world data. Al Khafaji notes the industry is in pilot stages, and scaling requires building a rich dataset across colors, weather, and regions.

RoboBusiness invites speaker proposals for its 2026 event, marking the company's 20th anniversary. This article first appeared on The Robot Report.