“Ideas and solutions are the easy part,” says Ricardo Khan, senior director of innovation at Mortenson Construction. It’s “the process” that is the real challenge. Khan’s midday keynote captured one of the key themes of the second day of the virtual ENR FutureTech conference—the need to identify the problems in your construction process before you start throwing technology at them
Boston Dynamics’ autonomous dog-shaped robot, Spot, is known for its ability to traverse complex terrain and is now being used by construction companies for inspections and LiDAR site scans.
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.