The growth of jobsite automation has come in fits and starts over the past decade, with a few successful pilots and deployments scattered in an industry waiting to see what sticks. Gilbane Building Co. has decided to make the jump from pilots to full deployment of a jobsite robotics platform it has been developing in a joint venture with robotics startup NeXtera Robotics.
“A robotic solution has to do a thing that people don’t want to do, at a time they don’t want to do it, at a frequency that wouldn’t be a hindrance,” says Mike McKelvy, CEO and president of Gilbane. “It has to be autonomous, not dependent on a human to drive it around.”