From home-building micro-factories to wall-building excavators, robotic construction workers are coming on strong. Civ Robotics now brings bot benefits to the surveying stage of the construction process, and they've just secured some serious cash.
While they're not quite ready to replace their human worker overlords quite yet, construction robots sure do like showing off their chops – especially how fast they can get things done. Just last year, robotics company FBR revealed its Hadrian X autonomous brick-laying truck that could stack and glue 500 masonry blocks per hour, potentially building the walls of a house in just a day. We also saw an onsite 3D printer that could spit out a starter house in only 18 hours, as well as a robotic house builder that could shoot out blobs of clay at speeds of up to 10 meters (32.8) feet per second.
San Francisco-based company Civ Robotics is also aiming to bring speedy bots to the construction site, but its focus is on the pre-construction phase of the process. The company makes a robot called the CivDot that can be dispatched at a construction site to mark out the parameters of the build, which it can do eight times faster than human surveyors.
The bot gets to work after it receives a CSV file detailing the coordinates of the project. Once the data is onboard, it rolls around the field blasting spray paint or shooting a beam of laser light at the exact locations needed to mark off the project's borders. Once the locations are marked, a human helper toddles behind adding a physical marker such as a flag or a stake.
Civ Robotics says the bots can achieve precision down to the 8 mm level (0.3 inch) and that they can lay out up to 3,000 points or 17 miles (about 27 km) of markings per day. That trumps a traditional surveying crew, which can get to about 200-450 points each day using their primitive tripods and vintage tape measures. The battery-powered machines have a 10-ft (about 3 meter) ground clearance, have built-in speakers to call out point descriptions, and boast eight hours of battery life.
Civ currently has 100 CivDots dispatched to job sites around the world. The company has just announced that it has both reached profitability and secured US$7.5 million in Series A funding led by AlleyCorp, bringing its total piggy bank up to $12.5 million. With the new funding, the company plans to begin deploying its bots in job sites throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Source: Civ Robotics
