I think that more than physics the bottleneck for this is political (at least in the US). All of the local large projects around me are expensive because of massive amounts of red tape (environmental studies, zoning, planning), and political patronage systems. After the kick backs, political donations, promises to only work 8 hours a day, only use union labor, hire x police officers for y hours in overtime security positions a month, use xyz contractor etc. a small cost seems to be the actual labor and materials. Hell these robots if they work will be made illlegal.
Do you have any evidence or are you just pulling this out of thin air? All sources I can find estimate pre construction costs between 3 and 10% depending on type of infrastructure and where it is (the US according to [1] is on the lower end with 3-5%). To put this in perspective the profit margins on construction projects is 7% according to [2], which also does attribute skilled labour shortages as the main factor behind increasing construction cost.
I work for a home builder. Our single biggest problem is finding and hiring quality contractors that have enough skilled tradesmen.
There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.
There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.
Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.
Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.
Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.
There are massive amounts of monopoly/duopoly interests in construction. Want to build affordable housing? Well if you are taking public dollars, you have to work with certain vendors which are approved and meet certain qualifications. Guess what, only 2 electrical vendors are approved! And so they work together and act as a racket to hold your project hostage unless you meet them on their terms.
Actually had a call today with an exec with one of the largest construction general contractors and this topic of "we can't do XYZ project [e.g. compete in that type of project type... driving costs down through competition] because we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with."
Every developer has a war story of getting burned exactly in some way by being beholden to political or labor issues.
This results in higher costs... which ultimately is one of the main issues among others.
That 7% is for the projects that actually happen. This misses all the projects that don’t when start because they don’t pencil due to the phenomenon that the original poster mentioned.
If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.
Construction costs are not the only costs relating to development and redevelopment. Financing and project risk are also quite significant. Issues that push back the start of construction vastly increase financing costs, and increase construction costs. A delay in getting a permit, or a stop work order because of an environmental lawsuit runs up the interest payments on the loan used to purchase the real estate, as well as increasing the impact of inflation, delaying the revenue, and impacting trades’ schedules, all of which reduce the ROI of the project. These are just some of the issues caused by delays.
Honestly do you not think what he is saying isn't true?
Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?
Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.
Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.
It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.
I’m curious if this is an example of survivorship bias though. I don’t have any data, but I can easily imagine lots of projects not getting built at all due to zoning laws or the red tape cost being too high.
I have myself physically tried to build housing and can confirm that this is definitely the case.
Zoning is probably the single biggest block to affordable housing in this country.
I was raised in a construction friendly household, I have the ability to build housing. I saw there was empty land in my city that could nicely fit about 5 houses on it (it was a 5-acre plot). I noticed that housing had become extremely expensive in my city and thought well heck why not try to be the change I want to see in the world and try to increase the housing supply.
Problem was that my 5-acre plot was zoned as “single family” which meant that I was legally allowed to build 1 house on it and not 5. So I tried to get the plot rezoned to a classification that allowed more than one house. Had to pay an engineer over 50k to create a plan for the city that was acceptable, including environmental impact study and drainage plans.
The zoning board committee said they would approve 2 houses to be built on the site but didn’t want to allow more because they were worried there wasn’t enough public transport available in the area (even though each planned house would have its own garage and road access). And literally I’m not kidding one of the members even mentioned that he was worried about this zoning change being motivated by a desire to (in his words): “enrich yourself”.
There are so many bureaucratic barriers to building housing in the US. Zoning is just one layer of bureaucracy that can be tens of thousands of dollars and years of back-and-forth with the city. There are even more layers with their own set of costs. Trying to actually build something is a radicalizing experience. It really feels the system is set up to intentionally limit supply and slow people down.
> promises to only work 8 hours a day, only use union labor, hire x police officers for y hours in overtime security positions a month, use xyz contractor etc.
Those are not pre-construction costs are they? Massive differences in labor costs described there.
Where I am it's $90,000 - $240,000 to subdivide land from one to two.
Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.
Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.
On top of all this is the years to divide the property.
On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.
On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.
These all have a $$$ cost.
$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.
So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.
I think this is true, but even after a construction company works through all the approvals the sheer cost of construction is insurmountable. A big part of this is obviously (sometimes union) labor. This happened recently in NIMBY-HQ Berkeley as interest rates crept up [1]. Pre-approved construction sites are sitting empty.
I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.
The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.
More than just red-tape there's whitecollar processes in pre-construction that take months. Just estimating the cost of each subtrade is a process currently done by hand on blueprints (what I work on automating).
`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`
There is red tape and certainly there are planning bottlenecks, but the GCs already deal with this. Once a project is funded and started, an established GC will move quickly to execute on projects. Also - some states (CA in particular) have an absurd amount of red tape. If you go to states like Texas, it's much easier. Robotic tools are pretty common already (machine guidance for bulldozers, remote ops for excavators, mine trucks), so there's good precedent. We view our machines as tools for people to use, and given the labor challenges, have a ton of customer interest as a result.
Someone I know worked on the rad tape for the solar power plant in Ivanpah California, and he estimated that it added ten to 15 percent to the budget, not counting the added cost of the delays it causes.
This is a bit like saying "if everyone was just honest and a good person, we wouldn't need police or jails or criminal judges". All these things exist for a reason (except for kickbacks). We have labor unions because of worker exploitation. We have zoning to protect personal freedoms of existing property owners. We have environmental impact studies because corporations have proven they are willing to freely dump toxic materials wherever they feel like.
I believe SchemeFlow [0] is working on solving some of these problem, particularly with the insane reporting requirements. But of course, that still leaves the unions...
> a small cost seems to be the actual labor and materials
Say less.
HN used to be a message board to gain better knowledge around certain topics, but seems it more or less has the same armchair dilettantes that plague other platforms.
To wargame the a rebuttal to this, the red tape might be circumvented just because there aren't rules to govern robotic work. You can fully agree to only use union labor, to only have humans working 8 hour days, or to only use certain contractors for hired work, simply because these systems aren't human operated (likely they will be early on, but you could spin it as this).
There are laws for people, but not necessarily for tools.
Tech can help with the politics as well. More construction would happen if it was technologically possible for it to be so fast that major projects could be finished in a single election period.
If you read the other comments made by this user they are exactly the political leaning you expect, including support for the BBB among other similar opinions.
Pre-fab is illegal in a lot of places too. Pre-fab is for the poors! Houses in this neighborhood must be assembled on site by lumber by a team of expensive humans from raw lumber, not at a factory churned out by the hundreds, shipped on site on a truck, and quickly put together.
Like yeah, typical pre-fab, where it's legal, is going to go into a trailer park or something, but nothing says pre-fab has to be cheap and crummy. Why are we still cutting lumber on site?
Politics certainly adds layers of cost, but it doesn’t change the fact that budget overruns almost always stem from unpredictable, non‑political variables, sudden material price hikes, weather delays, labor shortages, or subcontractor disputes.
So tired of this lazy take. The large projects are expensive because they are large, difficult, and require planning between dozens of different companies and contractors. Do you work in the construction industry? Or do you build "apps"? Real building requires literal blood and sweat and affect ecosystems and communities. It's going to be expensive and it should be.
> the time component of the zoning, permitting etc is very costly due to how real estate projects are funded and evaluated
How is this not part of the cost of permitting and zoning! If you took those processes out, those financing costs wouldn’t exist.
Last time I did the math, San Francisco’s permitting process financed at going rates meant a price floor of over half a million dollars for an apartment. That’s before we’ve even built anything.
I don't think a construction companies bank account cares about whether money is going to the time component or the physical act of going to city hall to apply.
Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.
Yeah if it was legal instead of technical hoops buildings would be flying up in unincorporated parts of Mississippi or Alabama. There's a huge difference between states when it comes to codes and enforcement
Actually 70% labor and 30% materials, on average. You will never believe that some times contractors propose to do curtain wall as alternative to masonry because pre-fab stuff actually a lot cheaper.
> massive amounts of red tape (environmental studies, zoning, planning)
Well, we've seen what happened without the red tape, when people were free to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and the results often aren't pretty. Sometimes, they were deadly, and occasionally we are reminded of why it might not be a good idea to just let the "free market" do what it wants [1].
Red tape doesn't just appear out of thin air, it appears when politicians are so pissed off about the "free market" that they actually find it worthwhile to do their goddamn jobs for once.
This is a red-herring. No one is suggesting loosening laws on whether a building will stay standing.
The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.
What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy
It mostly appears when politicians force law-enforcement not to punish bad actors for so long that society requires them to punish everybody so that the bad actors will go away.
I'm the CTO and one of the founders of Bedrock. I was very pleasantly surprised to see the excitement from this crowd! Happy to answer any questions about us (and will look through the comment threads here). We're looking for really really awesome MLEs and software engineers, so if you're interested take a look at our careers page https://bedrockrobotics.com/careers
Small piece of feedback: It takes far too much scrolling to get to the list of open roles. Maybe that's deliberate, so you know your applicants are truly serious about working for you, but I could see a lot of potentially highly-qualified candidates just dropping off due to plain annoyance.
to add to this, hijacking default scrolling behavior is such a massive no-no and super freaking annoying. it's also problematic for accessibility reasons.
This is more of an open-ended question, but do you think there will be a sure in traditional (non-software) engineering demand, as well as software engineering in more of a hands-on hardware context?
Software engineering IMO is alive and well, we're just going faster. Job will shift with AI, but that happened with compilers, etc. Clever engineers will continue to build. Going faster could mean you mean fewer SWEs, but could also mean you just go faster and build more things. If we go faster, the next thing will be down the chain (enough compute, enough hardware to work on). Since AI has always been insanely software bottlnecked, if it goes faster yeah there will be more jobs.
Robotics works now! We should build more robots! Some of the best companies in the next decade will for sure be building some of the robots from Star Wars and the Jetsons. This will be heavy on hardware. Outside of robots, hardware will change too - no idea if Meta's glasses are the best thing, but certainly the iPhone format isn't AI native. This will be new hardware, and we'll need smart objects everywhere in our lives (car, home, etc). Will be very cool and definitely more hardware oriented.
I read your careers page out of curiosity. It's like all software and equipment (what I interpret from "hardware"). Shouldn't you also hire some structural engineers and similar?
We’re mostly focused on the AI and software side of things. There are many great manufacturers for the machines themselves. We have amazing hardware engineers, so if we need to do structural work for our parts, we will. At the moment it’s not core.
We don't have any relationship with Trimble or Topcon, but yes much more advanced capabilities on the machine. On caving/shoring - ideally we avoid having people in at least some of the trenches... if you can dig a trench and lay a pipe down without manipulating it by (human) hand, then trench collapse is less of an issue. Obviously doesn't work for everything, but we have LIDAR on board, so we can handle surveying remotely without someone standing in a cut with a stick.
Faulty geotechnical - I'd be interested in understanding how the operator helped here. Will take time, but anything the operator is doing (watching subsidance, feeling the ground, watching a wall collapse, confirming that the ground is actually what you think it is), will be doable with the sensors we have on board. The operator we're building will have many lifetimes of experience, so will be able to learn things that even the best operators can't. We saw this at Waymo (now at 100 million miles!!!!) - it seems like magic, but if you had 1000 lifetimes of experience, you'd be incredibly good at very subtle things like this.
Are you planning on having these robots work collaboratively alongside humans? Or something more complicated like only driving near humans to start with but digging near them being a longer term goal?
Humanoids will be amazing when they get here, but I think there are a lot of challenges between now and then - hardware alone is very challenging - add a ton of sticky mud and it’s going to be complex even if the software works.
i had to look up whether stuff like mini excavators use control-by-wire/CAN bus or if the controls are actually mechanically operating valves, to determine how hard it'd be to just throw a lil computer connected to the CAN bus to autonomously operate equipment. it seems like newer and nicer models are control by wire, and older ones have joysticks and pedals that directly open and close hydraulic valves.
i looked this up in a "cost of humanoid robot" versus just doing a retrofit on a computer/actuators on older equipment. i think even in the actuator approach, adding 12 electronically controlled hydraulic valves to replace the human actuated valves is still gonna be cheaper than a humanoid robot
Probably - if cost goes down to operate a machine, then the base machines can be smaller. Will eventually be interesting to go for much bigger changes... ditch the cabs, lower profiles, place your cameras in smart spots, move the pivot points so they are best for the job instead of best for a person. Vehicle distribution might change, too - heavy machines are tools and the tool you choose is a combo of best quality, right cost, speed, etc. That landscape will shift.
The variety of machines and their specificity is super fascinating and very specific. Definitely will change.
One big barrier I haven't seen mentioned is all the OEM competition they are going to face.
Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
I'm sure this is already something they've taken into consideration, but it seems like this will be more focused on partnerships with existing OEMs rather than selling add on kits to current fleets.
It’s only a pro if Bedrock has some sort of advantage that the existing companies don’t and can’t easily get. Without some sort of innovator’s dilemma-type situation, they’re likely to be crushed (into gravel).
> Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
Sounds ripe for disruption, then.
If a startup demonstrates promise, VC money will flood in. Then it's just a balancing of economics. Is the new VC-backed method cheaper? If so, the incumbents will lose market share relative to the value prop.
CAT, Deere are both doing very interesting things with older autonomy techniques. Deere has acquired several companies, and partnered with others to bring in talent from outside. CAT has worked with outside companies (notably Trimble, Topcon) for key technologies when it makes a big difference. Both are awesome companies, but not AI/ML companies at the core and it'll take a lot of work for them to get there. I think this is very much like the self driving world 10 years ago where OEMs tried very hard to become software companies, but ultimately Cruise and Waymo were the ones that executed.
To the parent posters point though, those manufacturers are holding outsized control over what can be retrofit to their machines, so to disrupt them, you have to make your own machines. Working on and owning heavy equipment myself, I of course have looked at it and thought there's a lot to improve, but at the the same time, I don't really see where the big brain Silicon Valley + venture bucks ethos can be applied to the space, it would be a long and slow grind of doing mostly straightforward mechanical engineering and supply chain/vendor agreements to build something like a bulldozer, just to enter a near impenetrable market due to many existing sunk costs and long relationships between buyers and the existing manufacturers.
> One big barrier I haven't seen mentioned is all the OEM competition they are going to face.
Not sure on this one. The company likely has it's own vision but I've thought for a while that a swarm of small electric rubber tracked earth moving vehicles (small enough to fit one or two in a tradies van?) could work longer hours due to being much quieter. For larger jobs you put a single person in a small tower on overwatch and run it 24 hours a day.
This'd give you a somewhat scalable approach from small residential jobs to somewhat larger jobs while not competing against the incumbents directly and allowing you to work out the kinks. Then if it makes sense later, you build bigger machines with hopefully better battery technology.
Ultimately though, for proper big jobs, you need proper big tools. Maybe a partnership or "exit strategy" works.
Though maybe I've played too many RTS games like Supreme Commander...
If the missing ingredient is not some secret technology that only few of these old players have, they are probably too busy with their existing business.
Management may invest many years developing some new key technology on the side but when it comes to actually taking the market, it's hard to focus on two areas at the same time.
I'm an architect. Well really now an architecture professor who (elevator pitch) writes computational tools to implement sophisticated geometries in advanced fabrication...
That's all to say I want advancements in jobsite automation desperately. But it's WAY harder than people from other domains think. Imagine driving on a road while you're also building it while others are doing both around you too...
These folks seem to be concentrating at the moment on excavation which (without looking) if I recall is already a pretty active and developed in terms of automation. But get out of the ground and you hit some pretty big issues pretty quick. To get a sense, heres's one of my go-to articles when people wonder about jobsite automation...
Construction is dominated by scheduling. The high bit of construction scheduling looks a lot like job shop scheduling and job shop scheduling is NP Hard. To the degree that is true, there are no generic optimization algorithms.
But like all real world optimization problems, better solutions based on the specific nature of the inputs are usually possible.
In the case of construction scheduling, relationships are the most likely route to optimization. You can dig all night long, but if the plumber does’t show up in the morning to lay pipe, your schedule is not improved and the plumber shows up in the morning at your job site because of the long term business relationship across many projects instead of some other jobsite.
[I practiced architecture in the past. Everything takes as long as it takes].
Unrelated apart from the words "rock" and "construction": I wouldn't be surprised if we see dry stone construction becoming very practical thanks to advances in computer vision and robotics.
Dry stone construction is incredibly durable -- it doesn't rely on mortar which can weather away -- but it is limited by needing to reshape stones to fit together tightly (often by making flat surfaces). A human stonesmith can look at a handful of stones and find one which is close to fitting in the necessary spot; but a computerized system could scan thousands of stones and build tightly-fitting stonework with minimal need for reshaping.
An interesting thought, im pretty wary on most automated construction techniques, but dry stone construction does seem like a good fit for automation. It needs to be done before any other construction is really done and takes a decent chunk of time even for a team of humans so not a lot of people or other things going on around the area or in the way. There are still some issues that need experimentation. You can go 99% of the way with fairly simple imaging, but that last 1% can be tricky and usually requires tactile sensation and probing and pushing on stones to get a rock solid fit, but perhaps the actual technique/style of stone fitting would alleviate that last bit.
I didn't think open field construction was hampered by the humans in the loop? Quite the contrary, I was under the naive impression that the heavy machinery was already largely doing the vast majority of the work. Even when operated by a human.
Will be neat to see where this goes. But I'm reminded of some Amazon guys that were supposed to revitalize the supply chains. My memory is that that didn't work out so well.
CAT and others (hyundai, hitachi, john deere, kubota, komatsu, etc) are already exploring this sort of automation (and have been for at least a decade).
This isn't somehow a new industry because some Waymo engineers decided to make a company.
It is not easy to find on demand trained operators that are willing to relocate in an instant to whatever forgotten by god construction site you set up for months.
I find this hard to believe, to be honest. The capital costs of the machinery is already such that paying a premium to relocate someone for the duration of the construction is almost certainly not the bottle neck for most construction jobs?
If you have numbers on this, I'm game to see them. Just because I find it hard to believe doesn't mean I think it is impossible.
It is if you aren't adverse to training people and living with lower productivity for a few months as they learn. The biggest obstacle to becoming a heavy equipment operator is finding someone willing to put you in heavy equipment without already being an experienced heavy equipment operator. And the machines cost enough money that someone can't afford to just go buy their own excavator and practice, even really old used equipment that leaks fluids and can't run more than 20 minutes without overheating can cost 6 figures, especially if you also need a truck and large equipment trailer to move it. And even if someone likes the job and gets past those obstacles there are other restrictions, like drug usage, that keeps many people out of the business. You went home and smoked a joint last week but this week something broke or went wrong? Well you better hope they don't fear any liability because they will drug test you, fire you, and black list you to shed all liability.
If you can automate efficiently enough, you can build far finer structures.
For example look at how detailed the structure and weld arrangement is for modern cars, vs. back when robots only just started to take care of the frame welding on the assembly line.
Or how optical HDMI cables are affordable because they use fully automated UV-cure-resin-glued fiber alignment straight from the cable end into the optoelectronic chips, without needing optical connectors or any other human-labor to get the light path connected up. That's how they manage to do it the conceptually easiest way: amplifier->laser->fiber->photodiode->amplifier, and repeat for the 4 high-speed pairs. Also handing the low speed communication channel separately with just normal wires as signal degradation isn't an issue for that.
Or for example 3d printer infill: that's something no one would do manually in such a way, but if it's just automated it's quite desirable/efficient.
App rental e-scooters: they rely on automation to organize even when parked "pretty much anywhere they're not gonna block traffic", and as such become relevant for even short trips.
If you have an unsupervised robot that lays bricks for you to build up a house, you can get away with smaller bricks (and thus a lighter/cheaper machine needing a smaller crane to lift up/out of higher floors), than if you need a human to supervise it.
Smaller machine if slower means more machines, meaning cheaper production of the machines due to scale.
Auto-feeders for nail guns in construction means more smaller nails as placing 3 in a row takes barely longer than just 2.
Especially if the nail gun could, say, run like an optical mouse and automatically trigger at a configured spacing while dragged along a surface with the trigger held down.
Do you know how much California High Speed Rail is over budget?
What if we could bring massive infrastructure projects down from the billions to the millions? Wouldn't that be a great thing for all of society?
What if we could build new power plants, connect all cities with HSR, rebuild all our old bridges, add thousands of new skyscrapers, and do it all under budget?
Think about what steel did for society. Automated construction is the next highest order step function change. It'll be insanely good for society.
This is tangential, but I recommend Katsushiro Otomo's (of Akira fame) dystopian take on large-scale automated construction, the short movie Construction Cancellation Order, part of an anthology known in the west as Neo Tokyo[1], released in 1987 (Akira was released in 1988).
I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).
This to me vibes with the world of manga Blame by Tsutomu Nihei. In it large automata, have been building the mega structure long after biological humans are gone. The structure already encompasses the moon, and they are still building. Cool concept, which goes well together with the architecture background of the author.
Civil engineering is already a field where the very largest projects are done by humans planning and building the roads and bridges for the robots to move in (such as things rented from Mammoet [1] with extra control systems), but it does require significant human oversight (typically a metaphorical red button).
It's all very one off and specific, and given how big those projects are that seems unlikely to change. The manufacturing of suburbs though would be a whole different ballgame.
Apparently the providers recognize that there is significant growth in the complexity of control systems, and so there is a lot of fishing around for R&D funding on that side, however, being classic physical hardware people they severely undervalue the contribution software at that level makes.
Most of the actual planning and execution work is done by the usual big civeng consultant companies in a very globalized manner.
Readit News
[1] https://srgexpert.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/The-cost-of... [2] https://publications.turnerandtownsend.com/international-con...
There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.
There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.
Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.
Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.
Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.
Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.
There are massive amounts of monopoly/duopoly interests in construction. Want to build affordable housing? Well if you are taking public dollars, you have to work with certain vendors which are approved and meet certain qualifications. Guess what, only 2 electrical vendors are approved! And so they work together and act as a racket to hold your project hostage unless you meet them on their terms.
Actually had a call today with an exec with one of the largest construction general contractors and this topic of "we can't do XYZ project [e.g. compete in that type of project type... driving costs down through competition] because we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with."
Every developer has a war story of getting burned exactly in some way by being beholden to political or labor issues.
This results in higher costs... which ultimately is one of the main issues among others.
If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.
Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?
Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.
Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.
It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/high-speed-rail-califo...
Zoning is probably the single biggest block to affordable housing in this country.
I was raised in a construction friendly household, I have the ability to build housing. I saw there was empty land in my city that could nicely fit about 5 houses on it (it was a 5-acre plot). I noticed that housing had become extremely expensive in my city and thought well heck why not try to be the change I want to see in the world and try to increase the housing supply.
Problem was that my 5-acre plot was zoned as “single family” which meant that I was legally allowed to build 1 house on it and not 5. So I tried to get the plot rezoned to a classification that allowed more than one house. Had to pay an engineer over 50k to create a plan for the city that was acceptable, including environmental impact study and drainage plans.
The zoning board committee said they would approve 2 houses to be built on the site but didn’t want to allow more because they were worried there wasn’t enough public transport available in the area (even though each planned house would have its own garage and road access). And literally I’m not kidding one of the members even mentioned that he was worried about this zoning change being motivated by a desire to (in his words): “enrich yourself”.
There are so many bureaucratic barriers to building housing in the US. Zoning is just one layer of bureaucracy that can be tens of thousands of dollars and years of back-and-forth with the city. There are even more layers with their own set of costs. Trying to actually build something is a radicalizing experience. It really feels the system is set up to intentionally limit supply and slow people down.
Those are not pre-construction costs are they? Massive differences in labor costs described there.
Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.
Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.
On top of all this is the years to divide the property.
On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.
On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.
These all have a $$$ cost.
$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.
So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.
I am off the (not so controversial) opinion that labor should be paid fair wages, but I think it's also fair to use tech like this to multiply labor productivity.
The last piece is the cost of raw materials, which has also ballooned.
[1]: https://www.berkeleyside.org/2025/04/04/berkeley-housing-dow...
I live in Wyoming. We don’t have many unions. The cost scourge is still there due to red tape and general fuckery.
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...
`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`
Which is about to explode as the tariffs hit the US market.
Yes or no: can the USA get a medium sized build done on time and budget comparable to the top 15% worldwide?
There has to be way to kick this problem in the butt. And i think management side has gotta step up
all the labor is imported from abroad and live in miserable conditions, no unions or paperwork, just lots of earthworks to be done
[0] https://www.schemeflow.com/
Say less.
HN used to be a message board to gain better knowledge around certain topics, but seems it more or less has the same armchair dilettantes that plague other platforms.
Why are heavy machines like diggers and cranes legal then? Human operated, but replace countless workers on the site.
There are laws for people, but not necessarily for tools.
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Like yeah, typical pre-fab, where it's legal, is going to go into a trailer park or something, but nothing says pre-fab has to be cheap and crummy. Why are we still cutting lumber on site?
Unless you know the loopholes.
All of the cost is labor and materials.
That said, the time component of the zoning, permitting etc is very costly due to how real estate projects are funded and evaluated.
How is this not part of the cost of permitting and zoning! If you took those processes out, those financing costs wouldn’t exist.
Last time I did the math, San Francisco’s permitting process financed at going rates meant a price floor of over half a million dollars for an apartment. That’s before we’ve even built anything.
Also remember there are frivolous lawsuits, CEQA type laws (which was recently overhauled atleast in California), NEPA on the federal level which most people roll into the cost of permitting/zoning. This is no meme, this component is huge.
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Well, we've seen what happened without the red tape, when people were free to do whatever the fuck they wanted, and the results often aren't pretty. Sometimes, they were deadly, and occasionally we are reminded of why it might not be a good idea to just let the "free market" do what it wants [1].
Red tape doesn't just appear out of thin air, it appears when politicians are so pissed off about the "free market" that they actually find it worthwhile to do their goddamn jobs for once.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio,_train_de...
You mean most of the built environment of New York City?
The red tape is literally on whether barn owls in Downtown Mountain View will be hurt by an apartment building. This is not a serious consideration and is blatant NIMBY value capture and should be stopped and removed.
What's more, if you don't build that apartment downtown, expect real environmental damage when wild flora and fauna is paved over to build another exurb and highways to connect it all AKA the last 50 years of North American housing policy
It mostly appears when politicians force law-enforcement not to punish bad actors for so long that society requires them to punish everybody so that the bad actors will go away.
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Software engineering IMO is alive and well, we're just going faster. Job will shift with AI, but that happened with compilers, etc. Clever engineers will continue to build. Going faster could mean you mean fewer SWEs, but could also mean you just go faster and build more things. If we go faster, the next thing will be down the chain (enough compute, enough hardware to work on). Since AI has always been insanely software bottlnecked, if it goes faster yeah there will be more jobs.
Robotics works now! We should build more robots! Some of the best companies in the next decade will for sure be building some of the robots from Star Wars and the Jetsons. This will be heavy on hardware. Outside of robots, hardware will change too - no idea if Meta's glasses are the best thing, but certainly the iPhone format isn't AI native. This will be new hardware, and we'll need smart objects everywhere in our lives (car, home, etc). Will be very cool and definitely more hardware oriented.
How would I handle faulty geotechnical surveys? It has happened several times that the trench caved in and the operator saved a persons life.
Faulty geotechnical - I'd be interested in understanding how the operator helped here. Will take time, but anything the operator is doing (watching subsidance, feeling the ground, watching a wall collapse, confirming that the ground is actually what you think it is), will be doable with the sensors we have on board. The operator we're building will have many lifetimes of experience, so will be able to learn things that even the best operators can't. We saw this at Waymo (now at 100 million miles!!!!) - it seems like magic, but if you had 1000 lifetimes of experience, you'd be incredibly good at very subtle things like this.
i looked this up in a "cost of humanoid robot" versus just doing a retrofit on a computer/actuators on older equipment. i think even in the actuator approach, adding 12 electronically controlled hydraulic valves to replace the human actuated valves is still gonna be cheaper than a humanoid robot
The variety of machines and their specificity is super fascinating and very specific. Definitely will change.
Caterpillar, John Deer, etc. already have remote operation vehicles. And a lot of provisions on what types of kits can be retrofitted onto their equipment without violating their terms/warranties.
I'm sure this is already something they've taken into consideration, but it seems like this will be more focused on partnerships with existing OEMs rather than selling add on kits to current fleets.
Seems like that is a pro not a con. An exit scenario
24/7/365 large fleet operators that move a billion tonne of ore per annum and alter the spin balance of the planet by a detectable amount.
Pages such as https://www.riotinto.com/en/mn/about/innovation/automation are out of date and don't do justice to the extant of and demand for grand scale semi autonomous mining and construction equipment.
BBC coverage of one site and mining automation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgej7gzg8l0o
There's a large yet to be built copper project in the US that has autonomus mining plans in the economic technical report.
https://resolutioncopper.com/mining-method/
https://resolutioncopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/RTRC...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_Copper#Reactions
Sounds ripe for disruption, then.
If a startup demonstrates promise, VC money will flood in. Then it's just a balancing of economics. Is the new VC-backed method cheaper? If so, the incumbents will lose market share relative to the value prop.
It's the kinda startup that may be able to pivot easier than others.
Not sure on this one. The company likely has it's own vision but I've thought for a while that a swarm of small electric rubber tracked earth moving vehicles (small enough to fit one or two in a tradies van?) could work longer hours due to being much quieter. For larger jobs you put a single person in a small tower on overwatch and run it 24 hours a day.
This'd give you a somewhat scalable approach from small residential jobs to somewhat larger jobs while not competing against the incumbents directly and allowing you to work out the kinks. Then if it makes sense later, you build bigger machines with hopefully better battery technology.
Ultimately though, for proper big jobs, you need proper big tools. Maybe a partnership or "exit strategy" works.
Though maybe I've played too many RTS games like Supreme Commander...
Management may invest many years developing some new key technology on the side but when it comes to actually taking the market, it's hard to focus on two areas at the same time.
That's all to say I want advancements in jobsite automation desperately. But it's WAY harder than people from other domains think. Imagine driving on a road while you're also building it while others are doing both around you too...
These folks seem to be concentrating at the moment on excavation which (without looking) if I recall is already a pretty active and developed in terms of automation. But get out of the ground and you hit some pretty big issues pretty quick. To get a sense, heres's one of my go-to articles when people wonder about jobsite automation...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/where-are-the-robotic...
But like all real world optimization problems, better solutions based on the specific nature of the inputs are usually possible.
In the case of construction scheduling, relationships are the most likely route to optimization. You can dig all night long, but if the plumber does’t show up in the morning to lay pipe, your schedule is not improved and the plumber shows up in the morning at your job site because of the long term business relationship across many projects instead of some other jobsite.
[I practiced architecture in the past. Everything takes as long as it takes].
Dry stone construction is incredibly durable -- it doesn't rely on mortar which can weather away -- but it is limited by needing to reshape stones to fit together tightly (often by making flat surfaces). A human stonesmith can look at a handful of stones and find one which is close to fitting in the necessary spot; but a computerized system could scan thousands of stones and build tightly-fitting stonework with minimal need for reshaping.
Will be neat to see where this goes. But I'm reminded of some Amazon guys that were supposed to revitalize the supply chains. My memory is that that didn't work out so well.
This isn't somehow a new industry because some Waymo engineers decided to make a company.
This may be an instance of companies not having enough capital or talent to fend off new entrants.
Talent will flock to the new and exciting. The place where they can get the bigger exit and work with the coolest people.
If you have numbers on this, I'm game to see them. Just because I find it hard to believe doesn't mean I think it is impossible.
For example look at how detailed the structure and weld arrangement is for modern cars, vs. back when robots only just started to take care of the frame welding on the assembly line.
Or how optical HDMI cables are affordable because they use fully automated UV-cure-resin-glued fiber alignment straight from the cable end into the optoelectronic chips, without needing optical connectors or any other human-labor to get the light path connected up. That's how they manage to do it the conceptually easiest way: amplifier->laser->fiber->photodiode->amplifier, and repeat for the 4 high-speed pairs. Also handing the low speed communication channel separately with just normal wires as signal degradation isn't an issue for that.
Or for example 3d printer infill: that's something no one would do manually in such a way, but if it's just automated it's quite desirable/efficient.
App rental e-scooters: they rely on automation to organize even when parked "pretty much anywhere they're not gonna block traffic", and as such become relevant for even short trips.
If you have an unsupervised robot that lays bricks for you to build up a house, you can get away with smaller bricks (and thus a lighter/cheaper machine needing a smaller crane to lift up/out of higher floors), than if you need a human to supervise it.
Smaller machine if slower means more machines, meaning cheaper production of the machines due to scale.
Auto-feeders for nail guns in construction means more smaller nails as placing 3 in a row takes barely longer than just 2. Especially if the nail gun could, say, run like an optical mouse and automatically trigger at a configured spacing while dragged along a surface with the trigger held down.
What if we could bring massive infrastructure projects down from the billions to the millions? Wouldn't that be a great thing for all of society?
What if we could build new power plants, connect all cities with HSR, rebuild all our old bridges, add thousands of new skyscrapers, and do it all under budget?
Think about what steel did for society. Automated construction is the next highest order step function change. It'll be insanely good for society.
I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Tokyo_(film)
Civil engineering is already a field where the very largest projects are done by humans planning and building the roads and bridges for the robots to move in (such as things rented from Mammoet [1] with extra control systems), but it does require significant human oversight (typically a metaphorical red button).
It's all very one off and specific, and given how big those projects are that seems unlikely to change. The manufacturing of suburbs though would be a whole different ballgame.
[1] Specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_modular_transpo...
Most of the actual planning and execution work is done by the usual big civeng consultant companies in a very globalized manner.