The construction industry is finally making it’s leap into the automated world with amazing technologies including 3D printing, unmanned drone aircrafts, new robotic construction systems, and of course takeoff and estimating software.
The construction industry has been one of the least digitized fields of work in the world but Built Robotics, a construction technology company responsible for the revolutionary self-driving excavator, is going to change the industry by integrating construction with robotics to improve the experience of hard labor for construction workers.
Noah Ready-Campbell, Built Robotics co-founder, worked at Google for his first job out of college which is where he learned about what seemed to be a far fetched dream at the time, self driving cars, come into fruition. Now over 40 companies in California alone have licences to test autonomous vehicles.
With self driving cars, boats, buses, and trucks, Ready-Campbell saw potential for an automated excavating tractor in the $130 billion excavation industry. Instead of sitting in the dusty cab of the tractor all day, operators can program the coordinates for the size of the hole that needs to be dug and stand off the the side while the vehicle works.
Once Noah Ready-Campbell had his 10-person start-up, Built Robotics, he has been stealthily developing a retrofitted skid steer that’s directed via a computer program in a small dirt filed in San Francisco. This was the first step to creating the self-driving excavator.
“I’ve talked to some operators and they’ve said there are parts of my job that are really dangerous and there are parts of my job that are really boring, said Ready-Campbell. “If you can have a robot do those things and I can focus on the parts that really take human judgement, then that’s good for me.”
Built Robotics just raised $15 million in a funding round led by the NEA that will go towards hiring new engineers and getting the product ready for commercial adoption.
Carl Bass, who’s known best in the construction industry for his 24 years at Autodesk and who’s AutoCAD software is used by architects and engineers throughout the industry, was impressed with the retrofitting technology and with the idea that this technology could help contractors save more money.
“They’re going to people and saying we’re betting we’ll do it better and cheaper than anybody else,” says Bass. “They’re not going out and saying you have to buy a $40,000 machine from me.”