MurA is an autonomous bricklaying rover, designed in County Durham to lay 1,200 bricks an hour (design target): more than a skilled bricklayer lays in two days.
Concept render, not representative of the final mechanism.
214,000
new homes completed in Great Britain in 2024/25, just over half the 400,000 a year Britain needs
1.8bn
bricks used in the UK in 2025, for about 66,000 bricklayers and masons to lay by hand
317,000
more construction workers needed to build England's 1.5 million new homes, on the government's own estimate
minus 1%
change in UK construction output per hour since 1997, while the whole economy grew 32%
Sources: MHCLG, Scottish Government and Welsh Government house building statistics, 2024/25. Building materials and components statistics, September 2026, and Forterra plc, 2025 results. CITB, Construction Workforce Outlook 2026 to 2030. National Audit Office, Increasing construction skills, July 2026. ONS, output per hour, 1997 to 2025. Britain's need: England, government standard method, December 2024; Scotland, Homes for Scotland; Wales, Welsh Government 2025-based estimate.
MurA, in outline
MurA is a compact battery-electric rover with a gantry arm that reaches over the wall it is building. The footprint is 2.0 by 1.0 m designHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.2, Physical Form Factor, so it drives through a standard housing plot and the gaps between scaffold. Dry mass is capped at 1,200 kg design maximumHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.2, Physical Form Factor, and the battery pack doubles as ballast. Horizontal reach is 1.4 m design minimumHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.2, Physical Form Factor and vertical reach 2.2 m design minimumHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.2, Physical Form Factor, most of a standard 2.4 m storey from ground level. It lays standard UK bricks of 215 by 102.5 by 65 mmHARDWARE-SPEC section 13, Assumptions and Dependencies in cementitious mortar.
Drives itself to the wall. Four hub motors on double-wishbone suspension; top speed 6 km/h design targetHARDWARE-SPEC section 3.2, Drive System.
Four outriggers level it to plus or minus 0.3 degrees designHARDWARE-SPEC section 3.4, Stabilisation and Outriggers before a brick is laid.
Reaches over the wall it is building. Reach 1.4 m design targetHARDWARE-SPEC section 5.1, Structural Requirements on a 500 mm designHARDWARE-SPEC section 5.3, Rotational Joint slewing ring.
An absolute encoder knows the arm's angle from power-up, so it needs no homing cycle.
Holds each brick without crushing it. Urethane-coated jaws take up brick variation of plus or minus 3 mm designHARDWARE-SPEC section 6.2, Gripper Mechanism.
A load cell weighs what the gripper holds and stops the cycle on a mismatch.
Mortar at the rate the wall needs. Progressive cavity pump rated above 60 kg per minute design targetHARDWARE-SPEC section 7.1, Flow Rate Requirements for a continuous bed without pulsing.
A 250 L designHARDWARE-SPEC section 7.3, Hopper stainless hopper feeds it under Coriolis flow control.
Knows where it stands, and when to stop. RTK-GNSS and an IMU locate the rover on the plot to about 20 mm design targetHARDWARE-SPEC section 8.2, Global Localisation.
A separate safety PLC cuts power on its own, to a design target of EN ISO 13849-1 Performance Level dMACHINE-SAFETY-ASSURANCE section 3.2, PLd and Category 3 Justification.
The placement cycle
The placement rate is 1,200 bricks an hour design targetHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.3, Operational Performance Targets. Every state in the placement sequence has a fixed time limit, and if one overruns, the arm stops in a safe hold rather than pressing on.
Placing one brick, state by state
Control architecture
No GPU inference in the real-time path. A placement cycle has to finish in a bounded time, so nothing with a statistical runtime is allowed near the servo loops: no neural network, no probabilistic vision model. Trajectories are computed before the cycle starts, and every real-time task must be proven, by analysis or measurement, to finish within its deadline.
Every brick is decided before the rover moves. Placement coordinates come from a Brick Placement File, generated offline from the building's IFC model. It fixes the position and orientation of every brick in the wall and carries a checksum that the rover verifies before the first course. Once laying starts, the file does not change.
Coarse to the wall, exact to the brick. RTK-GNSS and an IMU position the rover to about 20 mm design targetSOFTWARE-SPEC section 5.1, Two-Stage Positioning. That is enough to bring the arm to the wall, and nothing more is asked of them. Each brick is then set against the course below by laser time-of-flight sensors and encoders, to a design target of plus or minus 1.0 mmHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.3, Operational Performance Targets. No satellite fix and no Kalman filter sits in that final loop.
Safety is a separate machine. An independent safety PLC, electrically separate from the main controller, watches its own sensors on a 10 ms designSOFTWARE-SPEC section 2.2, Software Layer Stack cycle. If the main controller stalls, the PLC sees the heartbeat stop and drops the main contactor itself. The design targets EN ISO 13849-1 Performance Level d, Category 3MACHINE-SAFETY-ASSURANCE section 3.2, PLd and Category 3 Justification: no single fault may lose the safety function.
Concept render, not representative of the final mechanism.
Offline planning, one file per wall
An IFC model becomes a Brick Placement File: every brick, course, tie and mortar joint in sequence, checksummed and fixed before the rover reaches the wall.
Planned pricing
Labour is the biggest variable cost in a brick wall. MurA is priced per thousand bricks laid, not per hour, and its planned Robotics as a Service rate of £200 per 1,000 bricks is half or less of a typical UK labour-only rate£200 planned (COMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.1) against £400 to £700 per 1,000 bricks, labour only, outside London: BestBuilders, Bricklaying cost UK, updated 6 September 2026, which runs from £400 to £700.
Price per 1,000 bricks laid, £.
The labour range is a published UK price guide for plain facing brickwork outside London; London and the South East run 20 to 30% higher. The MurA figure is planned pricing, not a measured result.
| Offer | Planned price |
|---|---|
| Robotics as a Service Origin C owns, maintains, insures and supervises the rover. The customer pays for bricks in the wall. | £200 per 1,000 bricks laid plannedCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.1, Robotics as a Service, Unit price Daily floor of £1,200 plannedCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.1, Robotics as a Service, Daily minimum. Below 800 bricks an hour planned guarantee thresholdCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.1, Robotics as a Service, Performance guarantee averaged over a shift, the customer pays only the floor. |
| Capital sale The customer owns and runs the rover. Origin C installs it and trains the operator; a maintenance contract is optional. | £55,000 per unit plannedCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.2, Capital Sale, Unit price For Tier 1 plant departments and brickwork subcontractors. Operator training £2,500. Prices exclude VAT. |
| Lease-to-own A route to ownership for subcontractors without the capital up front. | £150 per 1,000 bricks laid plannedCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.3, Hybrid Lease-to-Own For the first 200 daysCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.3, Hybrid Lease-to-Own, then ownership for £1COMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.3, Hybrid Lease-to-Own. |
Modelled example
A regional developer building 200 homes a year lays about 1.4 million bricks a year modelled200 homes at about 7,200 bricks a home (Forterra plc: 180 million bricks build about 25,000 homes); MANUFACTURING-ECONOMICS section 8.3.
Basis: MurA laying 5,760 bricks a day modelled1,200 bricks an hour (design target, HARDWARE-SPEC section 2.3) for six hours at 80% site efficiency; MANUFACTURING-ECONOMICS section 8.1, the design rate for six hours at 80% site efficiency, which the £1,200 daily minimum covers. Labour at the published range above.
Modelled on planned pricing. Not a quotation and not a measured result.
Competitors, compared
Machines are already laying brick on UK sites, and every housebuilder will compare MurA with them. MurA is not built yet, so this compares approach, not results: it is designed as one compact rover that drives to the wall, with standard UK brick and cementitious mortar.
Its figures are a design target of 1,200 bricks an hour design targetHARDWARE-SPEC section 2.3, Operational Performance Targets and planned pricing of £200 per 1,000 bricks laid plannedCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 6.1, Robotics as a Service pricing. Competitor lines are as publicly reported, with their sources and dates. Select a machine to compare.
Sources: SiliconANGLE, TNW and Fortune, 15 July 2026; The Telegraph, 26 July 2025; Bricks & Bytes, 17 July 2026; Construction Management (CIOB), 16 July 2026.
Sources: FBR, Hadrian specification, accessed October 2026; FBR announcements to the ASX, 23 December 2024, 13 October 2025 and 3 March 2026; StockWire X, 5 October 2026.
Sources: Masonry (Mason Contractors Association of America), February 2015; American Ceramic Society, from National Science Foundation material, March 2016; BuiltWorlds, March 2017; Construction Robotics product pages, September 2026.
Competitor figures are as publicly reported, on the dates shown. MurA figures are design targets and planned pricing, not measured results.
Designed to be certified
Eight standards and regulations apply to MurA, from the safety of its control system to the data its sensors collect. The test standards are targets on the certification roadmap, and the rest are legal duties or classifications; none is held today. CE marking, with UKCA marking as an option, is targeted at Month 30, March 2029. Select a standard to read what it asks for and where the design stands against it.
EN ISO 13849-1 grades how reliably a safety function will do its job, in five Performance Levels from a to e, each a band of the probability of a dangerous failure per hour; Performance Level d means fewer than one in a million per hour. The level reached depends on the circuit architecture together with component reliability, diagnostic coverage and measures against common-cause failure. MurA's safety functions, the emergency stop and the outrigger interlocks among them, are designed to Performance Level d (target) with a Category 3 architecture: two channels, so that a single fault cannot remove the safety function, cross-monitored by a safety controller that tests its own relays every cycle, for at least 90% diagnostic coverage targetMACHINE-SAFETY-ASSURANCE section 3.2, PLd and Category 3 justification. That safety controller is electrically independent of the main computer. Third-party assessment is voluntary for machinery of this class, as long as no safety function relies on self-learning behaviour. MurA will still seek an independent certificate from an accredited certification body, because insurers and principal contractors will ask for it.
EN 60204-1 sets the requirements for the electrical equipment of a machine: protection against electric shock, protective bonding, the wiring and behaviour of emergency stop circuits, conductor sizing and marking, and the verification tests that prove each of them. For a battery-electric rover that also charges from a site supply, it decides how the charging inlet and the battery system are protected and how that protection is checked. MurA's electrical design will be drawn to the standard from the first prototype so that nothing has to be retrofitted for the test. An external laboratory carries out the testing at Month 28 (test target) and the report is filed with the technical file for the mark at Month 30.
EN 61000-4-3 is the radiated immunity test. The machine stands in a screened chamber while a radio-frequency field is swept across it, and it must keep working correctly, with every safety function intact, for the whole sweep. The field strength sets the bar. MurA is designed to pass at 10 V/m test targetMACHINE-SAFETY-ASSURANCE section 2, applicable standards, and section 10.1, EMC testing, the level the EMC standards reserve for industrial environments, which is where a construction site sits with its plant and radio equipment. The test takes place at an external EMC laboratory at Month 28 and the report goes into the technical file.
EN ISO 12100 is the method behind every other machine safety standard. It asks the designer to identify every hazard across the life of the machine, from assembly to disposal, and to reduce each risk in a fixed order, starting with the design itself before any guard or warning is relied on. The output is a documented risk assessment, and every safety requirement in MurA's specification traces back to a hazard in it. A preliminary hazard analysis is written; the complete file is to be signed off by Month 18 (target), when a UK Approved Body is engaged to pre-assess the design ahead of the technical file.
CDM 2015 sets the health and safety duties on every party to a construction project in Great Britain. When MurA works on a site, Origin C holds two of those roles. Origin C is a contractor, because it plans and runs its own work on the site and gives the site a method statement for it. It may also take on designer duties: where MurA's brick placement plan changes the coursing, ties or other details of the architect's wall, Origin C must remove or reduce the foreseeable risks that change creates. The rover itself falls under machinery law, not CDM. The principal contractor, appointed by the client on any project with more than one contractor, runs the construction phase; the rover's working zone and its site access are agreed with them before it arrives.
Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 replaces the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC, which the UK's Supply of Machinery (Safety) Regulations 2008 implemented, and applies in the EU from 20 January 2027. It updates the essential health and safety requirements, adding among others protection of control systems against corruption, requirements for autonomous mobile machinery and its supervisory function, and rules for supplying instructions in digital form. Northern Ireland applies it directly from 20 January 2027 under the Windsor Framework. From the same date, Great Britain accepts machinery that meets the Regulation and carries the CE marking (SI 2026/867, made 22 July 2026), with no end date set. MurA's conformity work falls after the changeover, so the technical file is written to the Regulation's essential requirements from the outset. One CE file then serves the EU and the whole of the UK, Northern Ireland included, with the file and declaration in English for Great Britain, and UKCA marking applied as an option rather than a second route. The Declaration of Conformity is to be signed, and the mark applied, by Month 30 (target).
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's definition framework sorts Modern Methods of Construction into numbered categories so that housebuilders and funders mean the same thing by the term. Category 7 covers site process-led improvements: methods that reduce the labour a site needs, with the productivity and assurance gains that come with them, without changing the building product itself. The framework names site process robotics, masonry among them, as an example of the category, and MurA falls squarely within it, laying a standard brick with standard mortar on a conventional site. The classification is a procurement lever rather than a grant. Under Homes England's Affordable Homes Programme 2021 to 2026, homes built with any of Categories 1 to 7 counted towards strategic partners' 25% MMC requirement; its successor, the Social and Affordable Homes Programme 2026 to 2036, sets no numerical MMC target but still welcomes bids that use MMC.
MurA will be sold to businesses, but its scanners will pick up the people who walk past it on site, and that is personal data under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. The rules are set at design time rather than negotiated later. No facial recognition or other biometric processing runs on the machine, and no audio is recorded. Point clouds from the laser scanners are downsampled and stripped of colour so that no one in them can be identified, and they are kept for 30 days before they are purged, longer only while an incident is investigated; a site worker may ask for their incidental appearance in the logs to be deleted. The lawful basis is legitimate interest in site safety, and a privacy notice will be shown on the rover's screen and at the site entrance. A data protection lead is appointed from Month 24.
Months count from Month 0, September 2026. Every date is a plan target from the certification roadmap, not a milestone reached.
Roadmap
Each phase ends at a gate whose technical criteria are fixed in advance, and the next phase starts only when they are met. Month 0 is September 2026. The company is in Phase 0: building the digital twin, with the mortar pump bench test to follow. There is no rover yet.
Months 0 to 6 Sep 2026 to Mar 2027
Digital twin and mortar pump bench test.
Gate
Phase 0 gate, March 2027: mortar pump above 60 kg per minute targetROADMAP-EXECUTION section 6, Phase 0 Go/No-Go Gate, Mortar Flow, sustained. Get the result the day it lands, pass or fail.
Pilot pricing at £150 per 1,000 bricks laidCOMMERCIAL-STRATEGY section 7.1, Pilot Programme pricing, less than half a typical UK labour-only rate, is planned for the first three to five reference sites.
Months 6 to 12 Mar 2027 to Sep 2027
Bench rig and the 100-brick test.
Gate
Months 12 to 18 Sep 2027 to Mar 2028
Two Alpha rovers and a warehouse wall.
Gate
Months 18 to 24 Mar 2028 to Sep 2028
Three Beta units on a developer's test plot.
Gate
Months 24 to 30 Sep 2028 to Mar 2029
FPGA motor control and ten pilot units, CE marked.
Gate
Months 30 to 36 Mar 2029 to Sep 2029
50-unit production batch and UK rollout.
Gate
Why Origin C
Founded by one engineer in County Durham. Origin C Limited was incorporated in September 2026 with a single director, who is also the machine's designer. It is registered in England and Wales for research and development in engineering and for the manufacture of special-purpose machinery.
The design toolchain is open source. Mechanical design in FreeCAD, boards and wiring in KiCad, the digital twin in Gazebo, the node graph in ROS 2, a Linux kernel with the PREEMPT_RT patch for hard real time, and Yosys with nextpnr for the FPGA. A grant assessor or an investor's engineer can open every design file with free tools.
The main proprietary exception: the certified safety PLC. The machine's safety function targets Performance Level d under EN ISO 13849-1, and that level would be very hard to prove for an open-source runtime on custom hardware, so the safety logic will be written and tested in OpenPLC, then ported to a certified safety PLC for the final runtime. The development process is open; the certified execution target is bought in.
Final assembly in the UK. Every rover will be assembled and commissioned by the company's own team: mechanical assembly and torque calibration, cable routing and connector crimping, firmware loading and control-loop tuning, then safety validation ahead of CE assessment, with UKCA marking as an option.
Designed in Britain, for a British shortage. MurA is designed around the standard UK brick and cementitious mortar, the materials British housebuilding already uses, and around the plots and scaffold gaps of a British housing site. Britain completed about 214,000 new homes in 2024/25, just over half the 400,000 a year it needs. Building 300,000 homes a year would take 20,000 more bricklayers, the Home Builders Federation estimates, yet only 1,990 bricklaying apprentices qualified in 2023/24.
Three UK patent applications planned. Each passage about an application stays sealed on this site until the day that application is filed. International applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty are planned to follow the UK filings, and trade mark searches for the MurA and Origin C names are planned in the UK and the EU.
Sealed Held back until filing. See the held-back list
Investors
Origin C has written its hardware, software, safety, site-safety, commercial, manufacturing and operations plans in full before cutting metal. There is no working prototype. The company is at the digital-twin stage, with the bench rig to follow from March 2027, and every performance figure on this site is a design target until a bench test says otherwise.
Three UK patent applications are planned.
An SEIS/EIS round of £300,000 is planned for Months 6 to 12 (March to September 2027): £250,000 under SEIS and £50,000 under EIS. It funds the workshop and the bench rig from Month 6, and the parts for the first prototype from Month 10.
Two Innovate UK routes are being pursued in parallel: Contracts for Innovation, a fully funded research and development contract bid against a published challenge brief, and Growth Catalyst, a grant matched by private investment and filed once a lead investor is signed.
Nothing on this site is an offer of shares, or an invitation or inducement to invest. It describes the company's work and plans.
I read and answer every one of these myself, within 3 to 5 working days.
Or write to me directly: founder@originc.co.uk