There is a lot of potential in robotics; that much is evident—or at least that sentiment was evident at the 2024 Construction Tech Conference, specifically during the “Automating Construction and Maximizing Efficiency with Robotic Solutions” panel. Still, as the experts on the panel pointed out, having potential is not the same as realizing that potential.
That’s not to say that robotics aren’t finding their way onto jobsites, and that companies aren’t having success with said technology.
Our 2023 Annual Tools, Equipment and Robotics Benchmarking Report showed that nearly half of contractors are piloting some variety of robotic solutions, with about 30% employing the technology on multiple projects. And during the aforementioned panel, multiple guests cited real world use cases as veritable proofs of potential.
“One of our customers, for example … has implemented a drywall refinishing robot,” said Kate MeLynda, president and chief business officer for Formant, a platform built to improve data collection, analysis, and robot management. She talked about it in terms of, at least to some degree, relieving a person of a repetitive, strenuous task, making it less time consuming and less physically taxing with the same amount of workers required. “We’re talking about significant savings in efficiency, time, and cost.”
The potential of robotics in construction spans a wide spectrum of opportunity, from efficiency and cost savings for owners to safety and quality of life improvements for workers in the field.
“If you’re building a home in America, you’re 10 times more likely to die than I ever was … in Afghanistan,” claimed BotBuilt CEO Brent Wadas, who served in the U.S. Army for just over a decade. He added, “That is a statistic that is disgusting and needs to change … More and more, companies have access to technology that makes (construction) safer, faster, and more financially efficient.”
While BuiltWorlds couldn’t confirm the exact stat Wadas referenced, the exceptionally high mortality rate of construction workers in the US has been widely reported.
Robotics Across All Industries
The disconnect between the potential robotics represent and the reality of how often that potential is met is nothing new, explained panelist Ivan Mutis, an associate professor of civil and architectural engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology as well as director of the school’s Trimble Technology Lab.
“The construction industry is extremely poor,” said Mutis, referring to the industry’s historically low margins, rising costs, and the impact both have had and are having on cutting-edge tech adoption. “We’ve attempted already (through) 40, 50 years of research to implement (robotics in construction), but the current implementation development is … poor when you compare it to other industries.”
Worldwide, the operational stock of robots across all industries increased 13% from 2017 to 2022, with the majority of those gains attributed to various manufacturing operations, particularly in regards to electronics, automobiles, and machinery, according to a 2023 report from the International Federation of Robotics. The report doesn’t mention construction at all.
“We’re seeing robotics operate in a lot of different industries that you might not have expected before,” said MeLynda, whose business serves a variety of markets and sectors. “Everything from logistics, where it’s pretty well saturated, all the way to facilities management, cleaning floors, being able to move things from one place to another, lawn mowing, (and the list goes on).”
In effect, she explained, robotics offers a lifeline to industries struggling to find willing and able labor. “That’s really where we start to see it being applicable.”
Robotics Are Coming to Construction
Of course, there is no denying that robots, albeit slowly, are coming to construction.
Take, for instance, Wadas’ company BotBuilt, whose prefabricated home building process relies heavily on robotics.
“The more we speak to colleges and graduate programs that are thinking about very high-level science when it comes to both AI and robotics … These kids out there that are studying this stuff, they’re now very interested in the construction sector,” he said, adding that “venture capitalists out on the West Coast have discovered that there’s money in them thar hills. So they’re dumping money into construction tech companies.”
Over the last two years, BuiltWorlds’ own venture tracking shows 24 funding deals with 21 construction equipment technology-related companies, amounting to $325 million in venture investments.
The advancements in construction robotics technology and the influx of venture cash, Wadas said, has resulted in a “wave of more precise robotics” that contractors can afford. It is such that “anyone, even a former infantryman,” he said, “can use very precise robotic solutions at a much lower cost than it even was 10 years ago.”
So why hasn’t construction seen proliferated adoption of robotics yet?
A Failure for Some Robotics Companies to Capitalize on Pilots
For starters, some robotics companies fail to take advantage of their pilot opportunities, said panelist George Perrett, a former scaffolding builder with three decades of experience, who now heads up operational excellence in scaffolding for PERI.
“One of the interesting challenges that I’ve noticed in doing this over the last five years … is the number of people that would come out and pilot programs inside of our industrial construction project, and then leave after the pilot and we never hear from them again,” Perrett said. Speaking to the tech solution providers in the crowd, he added, “Just the fact that somebody’s willing to step up and give you guys a pilot opportunity is a huge win. Make sure you maximize that investment.”
The opportunities are out there, Perrett assured. “Anything that can … save a person or man hours on the site is something that will easily be adopted and tested.”
A Failure to Articulate ROI
Another reason contractors have been hesitant to go full in on robotics, plain and simple, is a perceived inability on the part of both robotics companies to show and construction companies to understand the ROI of robotics.
“ROI is a really big thing that needs to be considered and tracked,” Mutis said. “Robotics provides opportunities for new elements of seeing the problem: improving productivity, improving management, observing the type of materials being used. As soon as you start implementing robotics, you start to see a plethora of new data that you can capture.”
It’s an easy thing to say—to consider and track ROI—but accomplishing the task is a bit more complicated. First, as Mutis pointed out, you need to collect the data. But then you need to understand it.
MeLynda suggested deploying a management system alongside robotics “so that you can be more proactive about making sure that your robots are running efficiently (and) to make sure that they’re performing like they should be.”
Though, Perrett warned about overwhelming contractors, who aren’t data scientists, with too much data.
He described a scenario in which his company was collecting data in what was meant to be a 90-day project that the pandemic turned into a year-plus one.
“We ended up with 18 months of data, and it was so much that we just walked away from the whole project. They just said, ‘we can’t understand it,’” he recalled. “You’ve got to remember to keep the data you know you’re collecting from these robotic systems in bite size or manageable portions, to where you can actually show a result.”
Wadas believes this influx of data from robotics and AI systems will ultimately result in an increased interest in data science.
“For me, it’s not just about having all the data we can have, but interpreting that data .. and then implementing (it) going forward,” he said, “I think we’re going to see more and more companies looking into the science of analytics and not just in the collection of data especially as robotics, as we stated before, allow us to see so much more of the building process.”
A Failure to Consider the Workers
Something the panel brought up multiple times over their 45-minute discussion was a failure on the part of both robotics companies and construction company CEOs to consider workers in the field when piloting robotics programs.
“Selling to a CEO of a large multinational builder does me no good if the workers on the ground don’t think that I’m invested in their betterment,” Wadas explained. “We’ve seen many robotics companies fail because they get assigned to the lowest level workers that hate them, and then it becomes a total failure in their pilot program and is canceled because of that aspect.”
Robotics companies and contractor CEOs alike, Wadas said, would benefit from investing in worker buy-in.
“It has to start at the lower levels, the people that will be using the product,” he said. “Because there’s a big differentiation there … Those are the people you want to win over, not just the CEO who’s writing the check.”
A Failure to Manage Change
A big part of shepherding workers into robotics buy-in, the panel went on to explain—and really buy-in for any technology— is change management.
“It’s a song as old as time. It’s always the ‘they took our job’ argument,” Wadas said. “And that’s a real cultural threat that happens in robotics.”
And that makes sense.
Twenty-two percent of U.S. adults are worried technology will make their jobs obsolete, according to a 2023 Gallop poll. Apart from that, workers are scared of technology impacting their benefits, wages, and available hours.
Education will be paramount in transitioning workforces to include robotics, MeLynda explained.
“It’s not necessarily a displacement of the workers,” she said. “It’s enabling them to do more things more efficiently—being able to move projects along faster, being able to do work that might not be as safe or might be more strenuous for them to do alone.”
At BotBuilt, new clients are put through a change management process.
“What we’ve done is adopted change management practices with every company that we’re working with,” Wadas said. “Every builder that wants to build with our framing sets, we help their framers first go through a change management process to understand how we build panels with robots … hoping the framers understand that we are on their side to help them build faster and more efficiently.”
But the education shouldn’t end at the explanation, MeLynda went on, adding that those same workers should also receive “training to enable them to work together with this new technology.” Something that is not new to construction, she pointed out.
“There’s a lot of different things in working with heavy equipment that have already been brought into construction sites. Look at all of the new technologies … Look at the operational management that needed to be changed,” she said. “We’re going to see the same thing with robotics. It’s going to be slightly different, but inevitable, that those processes should be integrated eventually.”
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