An independent magazine about AI at work in construction. Every story starts on a real job site, with the people who used the technology and the results they will answer for.
Layout Robots Cut a 60-Person-Day Warehouse Job to Five Days
Bricklaying and humanoid robots make the headlines. The robots contractors keep rehiring print lines on slabs and drill holes in ceilings, and the crews that ran them have published the hours.
The robotics stories that travel in construction are about bricklayers, humanoids, and excavators with nobody in the cab. The robots that contractors keep using are smaller and duller. They drive across a slab printing wall lines, or hang from a lift drilling anchor holes into a ceiling, and they replace the part of a crew's day that involves a tape measure, a chalk line, and a second person holding the other end. Alston, Mortenson, Valley Interior Systems, Blythe, DPR, Rogers-O'Brien, and Southbase have published what their crews measured, which is more than any humanoid pilot can say.
Alston Construction's account is the cleanest. On the second phase of a robotic warehouse for a client that wanted conveyor rails set within a sixteenth of an inch, layout of the full project used to take a crew of four about fifteen days, sixty person-days. With a Dusty Robotics printer, one operator laid out everything in five. Rickey Molina, the firm's VDC director, said the layout grew from gridlines and anchor bolts to conveyor centerlines, electrical and pneumatic drops, and cabinet locations once the crews trusted it, and that every manual spot check came back right. The figures are Alston's, published by the vendor, which does not say who the warehouse belongs to.
Alston's account: four people for fifteen days became one operator for five. AI-assisted illustration.
What the crews measured
Valley Interior Systems, a Cincinnati interiors contractor, put a number on the rate. By hand its crews laid out 25 to 35 linear feet of wall per hour, depending on the job. With HP's SitePrint robot, one operator lays out up to 300 feet an hour, and the firm says it has printed more than two million square feet of interior layout across Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Rick Hutchins, its vice president of operations, gave the figures to a trade publication in July 2025. HP's own claim of a tenfold gain sits beside them, and the two match, which does not make either one an audit.
Wall layout per hour at Valley Interior Systems, linear feet (company figures)
On Mortenson's two-building, 700,000-square-foot data center, whose owner the case study does not identify, the gain was measured in trade-days rather than feet. Five trades each used to spend a day laying out the same slab, one after the other. With one combined model file and one printer, Abbey Mumford, a senior integrated construction manager at Mortenson, said all five were laid out in a single day. The mechanical contractor, Southland Industries, printed duct, pipe, hanger, and anchor locations from the same file, and Mortenson used the printer to name each prefabricated wall panel on the floor where it would stand.
Outdoors the same arithmetic holds. Blythe Construction ran a Civ Robotics CivDot Mini for eight months on the 18-mile I-485 express lanes project in Charlotte. Austin Ford, a surveyor on the job, said a stretch of highway layout that took a two- or three-person crew seven or eight hours now takes one operator two or three. DPR Construction's first job with the same machine, a 40,000-square-foot pad layout for modular office buildings, went from four days with a four-person crew to four hours, according to the vendor's account, which quotes Jake Nyen, a DPR business unit leader, on the tape-measure method it replaced.
The drilling robot with the hole count
Layout is where a robot's error is cheapest, because a wrong line gets painted over. Drilling is where the numbers get more interesting. Hilti's Jaibot reads anchor locations from the building model and drills them overhead from a lift while its operator stands on the floor. Rogers-O'Brien Construction, a Texas general contractor, posted in June 2025 that one operator drilled 355 overhead holes in twelve hours on an electrical layout, with no ladders or lifts for the crew, and claimed close to two weeks off the schedule. The post does not say which building, and it shows no schedule baseline.
The larger case is in New Zealand. The outpatients building at the new Dunedin Hospital, a five-storey block on a campus the government prices at 1.47 billion dollars, needed about 20,000 anchor holes for seismic restraints on its services. Southbase, the main contractor, and Dart Engineering, the restraint subcontractor, ran the Jaibot from the building model. The case study from the country's BIM safety programme reports the change as ten people drilling 300 holes a day before the robot, and one operator on the floor after it, out of the silica dust and off the ladder. It does not report a misdrilled-hole count, and it notes that the whole arrangement depends on the accuracy of the model the robot drills from.
That last caveat is the one every one of these jobs shares. A printing robot draws exactly what the model says, and a drilling robot drills exactly where the model says. Vincent Poon, the VDC department manager at Structure Tone, put it to Construction Dive in three words: garbage in, garbage out. The contractors above all describe a model coordination step before the robot ran, and Alston hired a BIM consultancy to translate the client's design into a field-ready model. The robot did not remove the coordination work. It moved the cost of a bad model from a crew's afternoon to a single obvious line on the slab.
What the surveys say, and what they miss
BuiltWorlds surveys its member contractors on robotics each year, and the 2025 and 2026 results describe the pattern above. In 2025 the share of firms reporting active robotics use fell from 65 percent to 46 percent, which the analyst Audrey Lynch attributed to fewer pilots and more repeated use on real projects. In 2026 the report found robotics use up 45 percent year over year while the pilot-only group nearly tripled. Both years name layout, drilling, and material transport as the tasks, and both name Dusty and Canvas among the tools that Suffolk, DPR, Webcor, and Turner have bought into. The sample is BuiltWorlds members, which means large firms with technology staff.
How a layout robot gets onto a slab
1The trades coordinate one model with every wall, sleeve, hanger, and anchor located
→
2A BIM coordinator exports the layout file the robot reads
→
3The operator sets control points on the slab and starts the print
→
4The robot prints lines, dots, and labels for every trade in one pass
→
5A person spot-checks against the model with a total station before the walls go up
→
6The file is versioned, so a design change becomes a reprint rather than an argument
The same month the 2026 survey came out, Bedrock Robotics said its retrofitted excavators were digging with no operator on Sundt and Zachry sites, and three vendors in the category reported close to a billion dollars in combined funding. Those are real deployments, and this magazine has covered them. They are also the first of their kind, on a handful of sites, backed by venture capital. A layout printer costs a fraction of an excavator retrofit, runs on a job the day it arrives, and has been bought again by the same contractors for several years. If a reader wants to know which robot will be on their next site, the survey and the case studies agree: the one that prints.
Before renting one
Pick a job with a coordinated model and a superintendent who already trusts it. The robot prints the model's mistakes at full speed.
Count the baseline first: person-days, linear feet per hour, or holes per shift on the last comparable job, so the vendor's multiplier can be checked against your own crew.
Keep the total-station spot check for the first three prints, and log every miss with its cause, model or machine.
Put the operator on the layout crew's payroll, not the technology budget. The saving is in crew hours, and the crew should own it.
Ask the vendor for a customer in your market who will take a call about a specific job before the pilot. Every firm in this article had one.
None of the contractors above claims the robot laid out a building better than a good crew could. They claim it did so with one person instead of four, in a fifth of the time, and that the lines were where the model said. On a slab, that is the whole job.
· Rogers-O'Brien Construction on X
13 June 2025. Company post; building unnamed; schedule claim without a baseline.