Construction Site Automation, with Dusty Robotics

12 Mar 2021

I spoke to Tessa Lau on her startup Dusty Robotics which is innovating in the field of construction.

At Dusty Robotics, they developed a robot to automate the laying of floor plans on the floors in construction sites. Typically, this is done manually using a tape measure and reading printed out plans. This difficult task can often take a team of two a week to complete. Time-consuming tasks like this are incredibly expensive on a construction site where multiple different teams are waiting on this task to complete. Any errors in this process are even more time-consuming to fix. By using a robot to automatically convert 3d models of building plans into markings on the floors, the amount of time and errors are dramatically reduced.

I reached out to Tessa originally because I loved their story for how they came up with this concept. By having her own house remodeled, Tessa had to interact with people in the construction industry on a personal level for the first time. In this process, she saw the multitude of subcontractors come in and out of her house and manually doing a multitude of things. Construction is an ever evolving, but incredibly anciant industry. Tessa knew there was room for optimization, but as an outsider she had to be careful and interview a multitude of experts in the field before offering a product in the space.

Eventually she chose to optimize the process of converting floorplans drawn on paper, to physically drawing them out on the floor. A time consuming task for a person that will always lead to cutting corners to get it done in the fastest, simplest way on a construction site.

By developing a robot to do this, she was able to add far more information to the floors, and far more accurately than a person would. This presents a step change in quality that makes the product something a construction manager would accept. The fact that this job is not tied to any one person, except likely the construction manager, means that buying this robot is not taking away anyones job, but instead adding value and saving critical time at a construciton site.

Dr. Tessa Lau

Dr. Tessa Lau is an experienced entrepreneur with expertise in AI, machine learning, and robotics. She is currently Founder/CEO at Dusty Robotics, a construction robotics company building robot-powered tools for the modern construction workforce. Prior to Dusty, she was CTO/co-founder at Savioke, where she orchestrated the deployment of 75+ delivery robots into hotels and high-rises. Previously, Dr. Lau was a Research Scientist at Willow Garage, where she developed simple interfaces for personal robots. She also spent 11 years at IBM Research working in business process automation and knowledge capture. More generally, Dr. Lau is interested in technology that gives people super-powers, and building businesses that bring that technology into people’s lives. Dr. Lau was recognized as one of the Top 5 Innovative Women to Watch in Robotics by Inc. in 2018 and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2015. Dr. Lau holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington.