Dusty Robotics

Headquarters: Mountain View, CA, USAPublic: NOWebsite:https://www.dustyrobotics.com/

Products:

FieldPrinter

Applications:

Construction

Background

Dusty Robotics is developing a construction automation mobile robot to automate the building layout process. The company only recent decloaked and is starting to discuss their intended application market.

The company was founded, and is led by mobile robot veteran Tessa Lau. Prior to launching Dusty Robotics, Tessa was the CTO for Savioke and prior to that, Tessa spent time at the storied Willow Garage. With this mobile robotics pedigree, Tessa is attacking the under-served construction robotics space with a novel application for autonomous mobile robots.

From CAD to Concrete

The application that Dusty Robotics is automating is the process of transfering the floor layout from CAD (digital) directly to the concrete. Lau says that mistakes made during this process can delay a project or even cause expensive rework when errors aren’t caught early enough.

The promise of the Dusty Robotics solution is that errors will be minimized when an autonomous mobile robot is used to mark the concrete floor for the location of walls and infrastructure.

Dusty robotics has built a development mobile robot, using the Ubiquity Robotics platform as a starting point. This has enabled them to solve the difficult problem of developing millimeter accuracy in the positioning and tracking of the mobile robot on a construction site. No word yet on what the final robotic solution will look like.

Tessa Lua was on stage at the 2019 RoboBusiness event in San Jose and showed video of the robot in operation as she discussed the features and capabilities of the system.

Dusty’s FieldPrinter solves a pressing problem: once a building has been designed in Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, communicating this design to the builders in the field involves sending printed documents to a field crew who then use measuring tools to manually mark layouts on the floor. The primary method for marking lines—a piece of string that is stretched between two points and snapped to draw a straight line—was invented by the Egyptians over 5,000 years ago and is still used today. FieldPrinter improves on trusted methods to provide crews with the most accurate layout plans. FieldPrinter prints all information from the BIM onto the floor, including layouts for each trade and details about wall types and door styles. What’s more, FieldPrinter creates continuous progress reports and communicates field status back to project teams in real-time so they can respond to any issues. FieldPrinter closes the loop between BIM and the field, enabling crews to build exactly what was designed.

Dusty Robotics has raised a pre-seed and seed round of $7.2M so far.

For more information go to the Dusty Robotics website below.