Rich Boyle: Laying it all out with Dusty Robotics

Until recently, it was rare to see robots at construction sites. They’re complex environments to navigate, busy with workers, inherently unstructured and constantly changing. While most buildings are now designed digitally (usually in 3D building information modeling or BIM such as RevIT), actually constructing the physical structure requires translating that digital design to the real world. A key part of this interface between the digital design and physical building process is called “layout”. It’s a complex, slow, and exacting process, and it’s been around forever (like thousands of years). If you’ve ever been on a job site (literally any construction site) you’ve seen people marking spots, stretching and snapping chalk lines, and using things like spray paint and markers to write instructions as to what to build. What could possibly go wrong? The dependence on error prone, manual processes like this are one major reason that productivity in construction has more or less stalled over the past couple of decades (McKinsey), and errors in layout are a huge driver of costly mistakes in construction.