From home-building micro-factories to wall-building excavators, robotic construction workers are coming on strong. Civ Robotics now brings bot benefits to the planning stage of the construction process with autonomous, roving, battery-powered surveyors.
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-m) ground clearance, have built-in speakers to call out point descriptions, and boast eight hours of battery life.
Source: Civ Robotics