Growing up in heavy construction, and running projects for his dad during summers, one thing Gregory Penza says he learned is that the only way to compete in construction is to come up with new and better ways to do things.
A New York company and two utilities have a cost-effective solution to the nation’s aging underground infrastructure: a robot that crawls through cast-iron natural-gas pipelines and replaces their deteriorating joints, effectively renewing the pipes for up to 50 years.
In 2015, Stephen Muck was sitting in a Carnegie Mellon University seminar on robotics, and he could not stop thinking about how the technology might benefit the construction industry, which suffers from a labor shortage, especially for backbreaking work like tying rebar.