Built Robotics, a San Francisco based robotics company, is developing driver-less bulldozers and excavators in an effort to simplify the construction process and make it safer for workers to operate the heavy machinery. Instead of sitting in a dusty cab all day, the operators can program the coordinates into the machine for the size of the excavation project and then stand to the side and supervise the vehicle as it does all the work.
Noah Ready-Campbell, the founder and CEO of Built Robotics was quoted in an Associated Press report saying “The idea behind Built Robotics is to use automation technology to make construction safer, faster, and cheaper.”
“The robots basically do 80 percent of the work, which is more repetitive, more dangerous, more monotonous. And then the operator does the more skilled work, where you really need a lot of finesse and experience.”
Built Robotics has raised around $15 million in funding from venture capital companies to fund the manufacturing of the self driving vehicles and the testing required to perfect them. Built Robotics is also a part of a coalition of tech companies that are attempting to bring the construction industry into the future.
“We need all the robots we can get, plus all of the workers working, in order to have economic growth,” Michael Chui, a partner at McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco said, “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.”
The self driving cars are programed to be accurate down to the centimeter but the software that actually powers the machines can be a little more difficult to program. “We actually need our machinery to excavate with dirt and collide with the environment and do its job,” said Ready-Campbell, “You’d never want a self-driving car to collide with its environment.”