Robots take the drudgery out of construction work
As a teenager working for his father’s construction business, Noah Ready-Campbell dreamed that robots could take over the dirty, tedious parts of his job, such as digging and levelling soil for building projects.
Now the former Google engineer is turning that dream into a reality with Built Robotics, a start-up that’s developing technology to allow bulldozers, excavators and other construction vehicles to operate themselves.
“The idea behind Built Robotics is to use automation technology to make construction safer, faster and cheaper,” says Mr Ready-Campbell, standing in a dirt lot where a small bulldozer moved mounds of earth without a human operator.
The San Francisco start-up is part of a wave of automation that’s transforming the construction industry, which has lagged behind other sectors in technological innovation.
Backed by venture capital, tech start-ups are developing robots, drones, software and other technologies to help the construction industry to boost speed, safety and productivity.
Autonomous machines are changing the nature of construction work in an industry that’s struggling to find enough skilled workers while facing a backlog of building projects.
“We need all of the robots we can get, plus all of the workers working, in order to have economic growth,” says Michael Chui, a partner at McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco. “As machines do some of the work that people used to do, the people have to migrate and transition to other forms of work, which means lots of retraining.” Workers at Berich Masonry in Englewood, Colorado, recently spent several weeks learning how to operate a bricklaying robot known as SAM. That’s short for Semi-Automated Mason, a $400,000 machine which is made by Construction Robotics Victor, New York. The machine can lay about 3,000 bricks in an eighthour shift – several times more than a mason working by hand.
SAM’s mechanical arm picked up bricks, covered them with mortar and carefully placed them to form the outside wall of a new elementary school. Working on a scaffold, workers loaded the machine with bricks and scraped off excess mortar left behind by the robot.
The goal, says company president Todd Berich, is to use technology to take on more work and keep his existing customers happy. “Right now I have to tell them ‘no’ because we’re at capacity,” he says.
Bricklayer Michael Walsh says the robot lessens the load on his body, but he doesn’t think it will take his job. “It ain’t going to replace people,” Mr Walsh says.
“To get qualified people to handle a loader or a haul truck or even run a plant, they’re hard to find right now,” says Mike Moy, a mining plant manager at Lehigh Hanson. “Nobody wants to get their hands dirty anymore. They want a nice, clean job in an office.”
At his company’s mining plant in Sunol, California, Mr Moy is saving time and money by using a drone to measure the giant piles of rock and sand his company sells for construction.
The quadcopter can survey the entire 36.4-hectare site in 25 minutes. Previously, the company hired a contractor who would take a whole day to do it.
At Built Robotics, Mr Ready-Campbell envisions the future of construction work as a partnership between humans and smart machines.
“The robots basically do the 80 per cent of the work, which is more repetitive, more dangerous, more monotonous,” he says. “And then the operator does the more skilled work, where you really need a lot of finesse and experience.”