Not that you cannot automate whole houses and sell them off the shelve for cheap (see prefabs), it just isn't something that could be done at a site where your brickbot 2000 has to share the job both with the workers whose jobs it replaces and with people from non-brickbot-2000-educated workers from different companies.
But aren't many of them? May be country specific, but in the one I currently reside there are tons of neighbourhoods that were built at once, 1000 homes+. In the US I've seen areas like that too. I can easily imagine a robot puts down the basics, and the individual tweaking is done later by hand.
In car manufacturing robots are used to bolt and weld together stamped metal panels, this feels more like someone designing a robot which would be given a flat sheet of metal and using hammer and dollies forming the complete panel to be attached to the car.
In short, if we ever see a major change to automate housing construction I expect it will also come along with significant changes in construction methods.
It's the difference between trying to take the factory to the site and just taking the parts to the site.
Also, as far as I understand, 3D-printing concrete does not give you any way to construct larger buildings, where you need pretensioned and reinforced parts...
Couldn't you just build a tent-like scaffolding for this purpose? Maybe one that can be extended as the internal build progresses?
It is simpler to just put the house there quickly.
Construction is one of those things where the process is much less regular and perfectly-repetitive than outcomes would suggest.
Eventually you end up with a dense city when you need to upgrade or replace a building in a constrained environment (think NYC or London or Tokyo), you have very different limitations and technology.
Robots exist en masse already, we just don't call them robots, we call them washing machines and dishwashers and factory lines. There's a blurred line in between machines that do stuff and robots.
In discussing the automation revolution, I like to think the difference is robots functioning autonomously (sorry dishwasher, you're not included). While there is still a lot left to do in speeding up repeatable processes, building robots that can run themselves with higher abstract operational input ("build a brick wall") is where the revolution is at.
Robotic tooling plays a huge role in this, unsurprisingly - robots need to do everything humans can do. But... we mostly build human interfaces, not robot interfaces - switches instead of electrical signals, handles instead of joints, etc.
This is for good reason; mass produced robots can't do basic movement, precise placement, etc. (well, not at cost). So robots are extremely limited to being bolted in factories or otherwise constrained environments. But when robots can start to do generalized tasks, I'd be interested in seeing exactly what kinds of autonomous stuff robots will start to do.
I think I understand your overall point, but what you said isn't exactly true. Isn't "speed up a repeatable process" essentially a partial robotic system?
Just look at a modern car manufacturing plant - it's essentially one big chain of robotics with human overseers. There aren't that many exceptions to car manufacturing once the set car variants are establish (LX, CX, blah blah model variants). I would consider that whole system a "partial robotic system".