Episode Description:
In episode 465 of the Smart Buildings Academy Podcast, you'll discover how robotics are set to revolutionize the skilled trades. This episode explores the cutting-edge advancements in collaborative robots (Cobots) and how they are already transforming construction tasks. You'll gain insights into how robots are tackling repetitive, predictable jobs, and why more complex, multi-step tasks still require human expertise. By the end of the episode, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how automation could impact your job and what skills you need to stay relevant in this new era.
Key takeaways you’ll get:
► How Cobots are working alongside humans on construction sites
► The challenges robots face in unpredictable work environments
► The types of tasks most likely to be automated in the near future
► Practical examples of robots like Tesla Optimus and Boston Dynamics Atlas in action
► Strategies to future-proof your career by developing skills robots can’t replace
If you're ready to explore how robotics are changing the future of skilled trades and learn how to stay ahead, this episode is for you!
Click here to download or listen to this episode now.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Free Technical Skill Assessments
- Smart Buildings Academy Workforce Development Program
- Smart Buildings Academy Courses
- Building Automation Training Guides
Podcast Video
Transcript
Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito. Episode 465, Hey folks, welcome to episode 465. Of the smart buildings Academy podcast. In this episode, we're going to be taking a look at robots in the construction industry. This is a topic I have been particularly interested in over the past couple weeks, there's been a lot of advancements with the Atlas bot, with the Tesla robots. So in this episode, I'm going to be telling you kind of what's coming down the pipe. Talk about how this could potentially impact you, both directly in your job, as well as in the trades that you are working with. First off, if you're listening to this on LinkedIn or YouTube, I or Facebook, I encourage you. If you are seeing robots being used in your construction projects, let me know. I'm curious how you're seeing them. Curious if you've seen any of them used at all. So that being said, everything will be available at podcast smart buildings academy.com forward slash 465, once again, this podcast smart buildings, academy.com forward slash 465, I do apologize if I cough or I'm blinking a lot. We've got fires in northern Arizona as well as in California, and that is really irritating my throat and eyes, so apologize in advance for that. Probably should invest in some sort of air filtration in this office. That being said, let's dive in. So there's these things, and this is the first time I've ever actually heard of this term, and I'm going to bring it up on my screen real quick. Give me a second. Here we go. So there's this term I've heard called Cobots, and they're collaborative robots. So you'll hear me use the term robots, you'll hear me use the term Cobots. They're interchangeable. So we've seen this in the automotive industry for a while. The automotive industry, some of the industrial industries, they utilize robots to perform repetitive tasks, and up to this point, that's largely what they've been used for. And the argument that I've heard is that these robots are great in stationary situations or in situations where there's a lot of predictability, but as soon as you get into a construction environment, this is the big pushback. I hear three big pushbacks on robots in the construction environment, pushback, number one is the construction environment is unpredictable, and the actual layout and structure of a construction environment can change, and that will make it difficult for a robot to do human tasks. The second thing I hear is that our tasks are very complex, both from a multi step perspective as well as from a dexterity perspective. We have hands. We have fingers. It wasn't until I started to listen to a episode where Elon Musk, I think it was the LEX Fridman podcast, was going through and talking about just the difficulty of making the Optimus robot, the Tesla bot hand, and all of the difficulty of the joints and the capabilities of the fingers to actually have just the right amount of pressure, because you don't want to crush things, you don't want to be too loose. So how do you measure pressure, how do you measure dexterity, and how do you control both of those? And then the third thing would be, not all tasks are linear, so we may have tasks that are multi step, but as you all well know, you may go to a construction site and start doing you know, an installation of a sensor. And you get to four o'clock and you have to end the day because there's no overtime allowed on the job. So you finish a job, and maybe you, you know, you wind up some wire and you leave it hanging on a J hook in the plenum, because you didn't get a chance to finish that. Just go with me on this. I know some of you don't do wiring. Some of you use subs. Some of you do. Just go with me on this exercise. So how does a robot properly interpret that that task has been half finished? And how does it know to analyze? Okay, I see this wire hanging on a J, hook. How do I know that that wire one needs to go somewhere, two doesn't need to just be cut there and terminated? And there's some answers for this that you'll see as we start to move through this. I will link to all of these articles so that you can. Go and look at them. They are particularly interesting. And then at the end of this episode, I'll give you some more kind of comical articles, like, will AI replace my job? And then this one video that this guy did, voicing over the Atlas robot demonstration and all of the Osho violations that that robot did in the course of his demonstration, which is kind of a tongue in cheek video, because, gosh, knows, we've seen plenty of OSHA violations just in our day to day construction work. All right, so collaborative robots? What makes it a collaborative robot? Right? Each one of these exhibits. It's kind of hard to see on the screen, but I'll read it to you. Is it's got safety features. It's human centric design. It's got easy programming, mobility and flexibility and interconnectivity. Those are kind of the key features that a collaborative robot, that one that's going to work side by side with humans needs to have, right? Obviously, it needs to be safe. We don't want stuff, you know? I think there was this one video I saw a while back where there was this guy, and he was drilling, he was coring a hole in a concrete wall, and there was a guy sitting eating his lunch on the other side of the wall, and it's kind of comical. He pushes his drill in the wall, and he's getting all this resistance, and he doesn't know why, so he turns the torque up on it, and then you see the view of the other side of the wall, and the guy's spinning. I don't know if you all have seen that video, but I mean, there's a real concern about if you're implementing safety or implementing automation. How do you know that it's safe? And there's answers to this outside of this video, if you want to read into that, that is one of the big concerns, not only with robotics, but also with AI. How do you build safety into things human centric design. And the reason I tell you all this is so that, as you start to see, because I guarantee you're going to see some of these things start to appear on your job sites. We just have such a gap in our skilled labor that I don't see, I mean, every class we put on for our workforce development with certain companies gets filled up to the point where we have to sit there and have internal debates of, can we take more people? And we have to say, okay, how can we take more people? Because there's such a need for going and training up skilled trade members. So I think you're going to see more robotics. It just once the cost gets down. And they're forecasting like 10,000 $20,000 a robot for some of these, like Optimus, and I don't know how much Atlas will cost, but Optimus robots, which are the Tesla robots, are supposed to be 10 to 20 grand, if I remember correctly. Don't quote me, I could be wrong. And then there's like a maintenance fee or a licensing fee, but that, I mean, you think about that, if that can do 50% of what a technician does, that's substantial human centric design, right? It's got to be that's why you see so many humanoid looking robots, because robots interact with an environment that was built for humans. So you want them to be human centric. They got to be easy to program. This is an area I want to dig into more to understand. My understanding right now is that a lot of these robots, the person wears a suit with a bunch of sensors, and they do the task, and they do it again and again and again, and that's how the robot learns the task, which comes back to the concern that a lot of people rightfully have, which is, okay, this thing can do a task, but what happens when a step of That task changes? And that's where this flexibility comes into place, right? Mobility is that dexterity aspect. Flexibility is the ability to adapt, and then interconnectivity. This is where it's interconnected, as you'll see with, for example, the jbot interconnected with BIM designs interconnected with
Phil Zito 9:22
project management tools, interconnected with users and their productivity tools. For the longest time and still to this day, a lot of contractors don't have proper project management tools, proper scheduling tools, and I think that will be an issue, hopefully AI starts to address that, but I think that'll be an issue in our industry, because if you're going to have these robots, or Cobots come into play, then the issue is that they need to know where projects at at any. Given time in order to properly execute tasks, at least until machine vision really gets off the ground. That's the ability to evaluate an environment, and based on the context of the environment, in your database of knowledge, make a decision as to what should be done next. You see this in AI driving side notes, pretty interesting. My daughter goes to ASU now. She's in her first year of mechanical engineering, and we see these automated taxis driving around. We see these automated food robots driving around the campus. So it's particularly interesting to see that. All right, so let's keep going. Will AI replace trade workers? It says you know why trade jobs, like Plumbing are safe from AI for now, and it talks about the basic gist of this article is that, hey, robots are eventually going to do skilled labor. I don't think anyone disputes that, that robots are eventually going to do skilled labor. First you're going to see manufacturing, then industrial and then you're going to see commercial jobs like automation, or, sorry, commercial jobs like restaurants, food service, etc, and then you're going to see things like Plumbing, mechanical work, etc. There's a lot of people who said, horses will never go away. Cars came and horses went away. There's people who, I mean, look at entire businesses Kodak, which you know, had film and the Kodak camera and got replaced by cell phones, and the pictures we take there. Sure, there's still digital cameras, or there's still cameras, but they're now largely digital. The thing is interesting is that I think people get stuck in a dynamic of they won't replace things now, or people also get caught up in it won't replace me because it has to replace everything. So yes, robots, as they stand today, may not be able to replace you now. They may not even be able to do 10% of the job. But as money pours into this and as people start to see, hey, there's a great line from Terminator, and I'm probably misquoting it, but I think it was Sarah Connor was talking about the Terminator. Maybe it was John Connor's father, which, oh, forgot the name, but, uh, they talk about the Terminator will never get tired. It will never stop. It will always keep coming. And that's the thing with robots, right? They don't get tired. If trained properly and the code is done properly, they don't make mistakes. They are very precise and very predictable. And I think that's going to be very attractive to business owners. And we have to, if we're being authentic with ourselves, we have to acknowledge the emotional impact this has a lot of our identity is tied to work. I mean, honestly, as a business owner, I ask myself, because I see the power of AI and what it can do, ask myself, how long is it until AI is better than me and it could do things better than me, and what does that mean if my job's no longer needed? What does that mean to me as a person? Does that mean to me as a man? What does that mean to me as a human because my identity is so tied to three things. One, it's a tied to my religious views as a Christian. Two, it's tied to my views as a husband and father, and three, it's tied largely to my work and somewhat to my hobbies. Well, obviously, I don't think my religion is going to go away, and my family, while my kids are leaving the house and starting to leave the house go to college, and I'm having to deal with that emotionally. My marriage is still here, and my wife cross my fingers, isn't going anywhere. So I've got that relationship, and that then brings me to work. Okay, what does it mean if I am no longer needed? What does it mean if AI replaces me one? How do I provide for my family? How do I have a meaning as a as a man, and I can only speak to being a man, because I've never been anything else. So I have to say, like I know men, by and large, at least from who I talk to, like to create. They find meaning and creation and prevent. Vision. What does that mean as that goes away? And so there's a lot of existential, existential issues, a lot of meaning and emotional issues that we're going to have to process through. Because this is a reality. These things are going to cost less to run than us. They're going to be more efficient than us. And while they may not be here today, in our lifetime, I really think that these machines are going to replace what we do, maybe not entirely, but this combined with 3d printing and just in time, parts things of that nature. I think we're going to see our industry being very different. Which brings me to Atlas. So this is the robot from Boston Dynamics. I don't know how much this thing costs. It has been. They've been working on this forever, and it's very interesting, if you look at it right, the guy up here, this is the it's a screenshot from the video where that one dude was going and saying, all the OSHA violations. This robot's running and doing backflips through the construction site on scaffolding and throwing parts to a guy who's standing on scaffolding. And, yeah, I get it. Probably not going to be doing that at a construction site, but its ability to go and navigate and do things is pretty impressive. How far it's come. If you watch this thing where, I think I watched it eight years ago, and it was falling over and couldn't go up steps and things, and now it's it's made a huge shift. So let's start to get a little more practical on what is going to happen. Well, first off, we're going to see robots come into play. One of the robots that is particularly interesting to me is this thing called the J bot. And what it does, essentially, you see, it's got a little vacuum tube on here. It's got a drill in here, and it ties into the BIM layout of a project. So right we see the shell and core right here the building, and it is going around into the actual slab that's separating each floor, and it's pre drilling and sealing each hole. So if I were to share this here, let me mute it so it doesn't blast my ears. And I want to go to this particular spot in the video right here. I don't know how well this is going to share. Let me shrink my camera, but I find this particularly interesting. You can see right it's going and actually drilling holes into the ceiling and then sealing those holes. It's fascinating, because you think about all of the jokes we've seen right of where
Phil Zito 17:52
a pipe is going through ductwork, or someone cuts the pipe in half because the ductwork supposed to go through it. What does it mean from a coordination perspective, when the trades leave for the night and this thing comes in and pre drills all the holes, and then the electricians simply have to go and run the pipe. What does that mean from a productivity perspective, when you can have something like this run at night, when there's no one on the site, and then during the day, you just come and do work. That's how I see these robots initially being deployed in our industry, is they'll find the tasks that are highly predictable, highly repeatable, and then this will go at night and do all of those tasks, and then the specialized, more dexterous tasks, like ending conduit, running wire, etc, will be done by the actual human labor, until, right then another robot comes along and gradually takes on that. So I think what you will see and how you should consider this. If you think about what is AI going to replace, and how is it going to replace, or, sorry, what are robots going to replace, and how are they going to replace me and my tasks, look at the things that are highly repeatable and lower amounts of steps and very predictable, and those are the tasks that are most likely to be replaced. So we think about, what do we do in building automation that's highly repeatable, highly predictable, mounting thermostats, pretty predictable, pretty repeatable, some simple tasks going and terminating wires, in some case, on panels. This is why I think you're going to see a lot more panel fabrication. I think you will see it'd be interesting to see if a. Um, terminal blocks start to go on the outside of panels. Or if we start to rethink panel design so that machines can more easily terminate wires, it'll be interesting to see if we switch from maybe wires terminating into Terminal strips more to plugs, because plugs require less steps than actual termination, because you have to be very precise in putting the wire in the terminal. You have to be precise in how you torque that down, and you have to be precise in tug testing it to make sure it's not loose terminals or sorry, plugs, you don't really have that issue. So it'll be interesting to see how that kind of stuff gets rethought. Let's move on to ABB. So ABB is not only kind of building automation line of business, but they also have an industrial line of business that they're known for, drives and industrial PLCs. This, I found interesting. This is just kind of a mock up that they're working in Zurich because ABB is based in Europe, you can see that they are doing some framing. And so I find this particularly interesting how this machine is doing framing. What does this look like in the commercial space? Obviously, one of these machines. How it's laid out right now, where it's running across a sled that's hanging on a ceiling that's pretty stationary. So are we looking that you would deploy one of these onto a construction site, and then it would go and do, just in time, prefab and at the construction site, and then you would have cranes and whatnot that move things in place. I know people, at least on the residential side, I've been talking about modular building and doing modular building for the longest amount of time, it has been a construction topic, and there's one I'll probably dig into in a future episode. This is a very new kind of episode, so I'll be very interested in your feedback if we should do more of these kind of episodes where we look at what's going on in the industry. I provide my thoughts and insights, and you give your feedback in the comments, but this is one that I'm interested to see how prefab and modularity work in construction. I know there are construction sites where this is being done, especially in the data center space, and things like the fab plant space, where they're doing a lot of prefab So, and when I say fab, I'm talking about fabrication of computer chips. So what does this look like in our commercial office space, in our hospital space? I don't know. I personally have not seen any hospitals or commercial office buildings that are doing tremendous prefab and modularity. But maybe I'm just not exposed to them, and maybe you are. So if you have seen that, and you've seen it on your projects, very interested, let me know in the comments. So this gives a little bit more perspective on where we're seeing things being done right now, bricklaying. I've personally seen these where you have people doing bricklaying of robots and they're sitting there, or robots that are doing bricklaying, semi automated masonry, right? So you've got a mason who's sitting there, he's putting down the mortar, and then you've got the machine doing the brick laying. It looks like, I don't know too much about this. It says that it actually applies the mortar in the bricks. And then the Mason super supervises it by correctly placing it, I can imagine. Then you build AI and machine vision into this, and it learns and becomes more precise, right here. This is a robot that is doing construction layout. So I talked about BIM, and I talked about one of the biggest issues is coordination between the trades, having a robot like this that can go around and mark in different colors. And can dynamically evaluate a shell and core and then adjust the BIM models or provide feedback on BIM model adjustment. Think this actually has a pretty good space in the industry, and it'll be something that, personally, I think would be helpful demolition robots. I'm going to kind of skip over this, because it's not really our space welding and painting, right? Things that do welding, things that do painting. This is going to be interesting. This is kind of like that drilling robot that I told you about, and then 3d printing, I think we have not. Even begun to see the benefits of 3d printing. It'll be interesting to me, because I got to go to crestron's headquarters back when I worked for Johnson Controls, and I was in charge of their partner ecosystem, and I got to go there, and they had these big 3d printers, and they would tell me that they would 3d print parts, and they would fit them and test them to make sure they all worked before putting them into production. Well, why can't we actually 3d print our devices on the job site? It would be very I admittedly, I'm not a 3d printer expert, and I could be completely wrong on this and ignorant. So forgive me, for those of you who do this as a hobby, and you're like, Phil, you're completely wrong with this. But I could imagine a scenario in which, instead of building controllers, sensors, all sorts of things and shipping them. Why could we not 3d print them? Because you can print metal. You can 3d print plastic. Why could we not have a 3d printer on site and just ship the raw materials and then do just in time printing of whatever we need, very much like Star Trek, where you've got the replicator and you basically create whatever you need just in time. So it'll be interesting to see how that flushes out. This talks a little bit about the five kind of key industrial automation things. This is a Rockwell site automation to deal with the skilled worker shortage, artificial intelligence, like I said, this is something that's a little scary to me. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out on job sites. It'd be very interesting to know, and I should research this. Of what project management software right now has AI built into it, because I could imagine a world where you have project management software. It asks you a couple questions. It learns, oh, this is a hospital in, you know, Arizona, and it's got 400 beds, and it needs to be built by this and it's being done by these trades. And it starts to learn, hey, this is typically where projects slip. These are dependencies that you may not be aware of, and starts to make recommendations for optimizing that project. Immersive technologies, VR and AR. I've
Phil Zito 27:35
gotten a lot of questions about this. Folks have asked me, What do you think? I don't know what I think I've had this idea for the longest time that you could have a barcode on a piece of equipment. You'd scan a barcode. That barcode would then go and bring up that piece of equipment. It's BIM model, it's data dynamically, what's going on, and you could send this back to like a central operating hub that's staffed with experts, and essentially, like a timeshare of experts, you get access to them in time slices. So rather than having to have a super tech on your company staff, there's like a centralized hub that has a bunch of super techs, and because they're assisting people based on time slices, you then can fully keep them utilized, whereas, if they were working for your company, you may not have them utilized throughout the year. And then VR and AR come into play in that they allow the super tech to help troubleshoot and guide the regular tech in the field, and do it based on augmented reality. So adding, you know, a diagram overlay of, hey, this is how it's wired right now, this is how it should look. Notice the difference. Make the change, edge computing, cloud computing, fancy words that I hear from a lot of people, basically, they're trying to push a lot of the because AI is very resource intensive. It's going to be one of the biggest challenges to solve, and the more you can push that closer to the actual data, the less you're going to have to go and transport, transport and process that data. You'll process it right there at the device, and then blockchain. This is something, admittedly, I should talk to my brother about, who's a AI programmer at Amazon Web Services. He's pretty smart guy, and I should talk to him, because I admittedly, while I understand in theory how blockchain works as it basically is a way of tracking transactions a. Computers. It essentially makes sure that, hey, if I'm doing something it's tracked. It's a way to authenticate things. It's a way to ensure that messaging is real and accurate and secure. But I don't understand it completely, so that's an area I definitely need to grow in my knowledge. Now for some humorous stuff, okay, we've talked about stuff that may cause you to have an emotional reaction. You may be like, there's never going to take my job, or what am I going to be if I'm not working? I've went through both of those feelings, but let's look at this. This is kind of a comical right here, that there's a OSHA violation video and meme, which I'm not going to bring up, because I don't know whatever's going to pop up on Twitter when I open it, and I'm gonna share that on a podcast, because who knows, with the election season going on, I don't know what will pop up. And, yeah, we'll just leave it at that, but I will say that there is some interesting stuff on this in that he shows, hey, this thing is able to do all this great stuff, but how does it fit in to the grand scheme of construction? And then finally, this is kind of a comical right here. It's called, will robots take my job? It's pretty stupid, but it's basically a bunch of people go in here, and they provide their thoughts on if robots are going to take the job or not, and then it caches all that data and gives you what the industry thinks so. All right, folks, I hope you've enjoyed this episode, I hope you've learned a thing or two. I hope you've got a better idea of things to look out for, as far as automation. And I hope you're thinking, What can I do to make myself more valuable? In regards to complex tasks, multi step tasks, tasks that require a lot of thinking and a lot of creativity, because I think those will be the last tasks that are automated. Because I'll be honest with you, eventually all of our tasks are going to be automated. It just makes no sense to pay human labor when you can get predictable results without the variability from a asset that you only have to pay for once, and then you depreciate, from a tax perspective, as you use it. So P, it's a whole nother topic that'd be interesting to bring on a tax expert who could talk to potential future ideas around how they're going to deal with robots that aren't really people, so you don't tax them. Do you tax the business? What do you do? All right, everybody. Everything will be at podcast that smart buildings. Academy.com forward slash 465, once again, that's podcast that's smart buildings. Academy.com forward slash 465, let me know if you like this episode. Let me know in the comments if you'd like me to do more of these kind of news and state of the industry episodes. If so, definitely will. I look forward to your feedback and questions. Thank you so much, and have an awesome day. Take care. You.
