Barcelona-based Scaled Robotics built a Wall-E doppelgänger to navigate around and build maps of construction sites by fusing images, video, and data captured by its robots.
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Skel robotics is digitizing construction Through the introduction of autonomous Mobile robots which automatically doing Progress monitoring before construction So let’s break that down a little bit What is progress monitoring exactly Literally what do you the robots do how Do they work in the construction site Our mobile robots are moving around and They’re fusing multiple sources of Information to build these maps of the World so it’s not quite as simple as Just traditional laser scanning we’re Adding a lot more extra information such As images video and also the data that The robots producing inside so it’s sort Of like we compared to the Google cars That go around you know mapping the Worlds You’ve built a sort of very dedicated Version about to work inside Construction sites I mean that’s pretty Much it we’re leveraging a lot of the Technology that came from developing Autonomous vehicles but we’re taking That technology and we’re really Refining it specifically for the Construction industry and in terms of The data that you’re capturing the High-resolution granular very sort of Detailed data there’s literally no way That that would ever be a kind of a Human job to do that you’d need an army Of humans to try to do that so you’re
Not replacing a specific kind of job Role really with this sort of technology To give you a perspective of how a Construction site recently was solving One of these problems they wanted to Know if all the ducts in the ceiling Were above two meters so they took a two Meter stick and they just walked around To see if they would bump into things at Two meters so it’s just impossible for a Human being to do this without a tool And you I mean people have developed Tools to be able to solve this problem At laser measures or tape measures or Rulers but you just can’t do that for Like a hundred thousand elements in a Building it’s just not scalable possible So you need tools like this to solve That problem now your background is in Architecture to a degree oh I believe You works designing buildings yourself Yes so talk us through how you came up With the idea for this business you Presumably identified this was a problem So talk us through that process Essentially it was really born out of This frustration of not having the tools To be able to actually build what we Designed in the office and this was Something that kind of Born out of some of the work we were Doing in the Masters course and it was Around this time that I met my Co-founder Roxanne Karen who’s the CTO
Of the company and we kind of put the Things together into kind of a more Holistic business plan and a company That we could actually start executing On these plans to bring this to the real Industry to life how ready is the Construction industry generally for Something that’s so you know cutting Edge and different how are you kind of Approaching selling it this new Technology this new approach there’s Quite transformative approach to these Industry which I imagine has quite Traditional ways of working it’s been Surprisingly simple to explain to them What the value is and they’re desperate For these solutions there’s a labor Shortage we just don’t have enough Skilled labor to actually build what we Want to build at the pace we want to Build it so this is a problem so you Have to use what you have more Efficiently and construction companies Are putting a huge amount of energy into Building what are called dim models like Huge information models and they’re Working out that they’ve put a lot of Energy into 3d modeling but they they Can’t extract any of that from the Construction site so explaining to them The return on investment for this has Been surprisingly easy to be honest how Did the human construction workers on The site react to the robots to be
Honest there’s been overwhelmingly Positive at the beginning people are Generally a little bit kind of shocked To see a robot on a construction site It’s not a normal thing that you see but After maybe 20 or 30 minutes of yelling Like weird jokes or like making fun or Just staring at it taking videos even Snapchatting it to their friends they Just accept it as another tool on the Construction site so they they come up They ask a question they understand what It does and they say they internalize it And they go okay it’s just another thing That’s moving around it’s doing its job It has every right to be here and it’s Been really good to see that kind of Acceptance
