[jumpkick]

I wonder how it avoids pipes stubbed up through the slab, or electrical EMT, etc. or how it avoids mistakes made during the rough-in.

What if the plumber missed a drain or supply by an inch? Guessing the robot doesn't adjust its outline. I.e. if a sewer stub is wrong by a few inches, the wall needs to be moved to fit the toilet, or the slab needs to be busted up and the sewer line relocated.

I suppose if it gets some of this wrong, it'll be obvious, and a human can correct it.

[LeifCarrotson]

Realistically, if the plumber missed a drain or supply by an inch, it's probably fine to just move the wall by a few inches...but it ought to go back to engineering to verify that's so, and engineering can redraw the prints for the robot.

It's almost certainly not the layout guy's job to decide that the bathroom can be 3" larger than it was and the lobby 3" smaller.

I deal with this relatively often in a machining context - People complain that they'd rather just make simple parts on the Bridgeport manual mill rather than a CNC, because they can adjust on the fly with the manual mill but have to get the CAD changed so that CAM can adapt to the modifications. But when they make it manually, and a year later we need to ship out a replacement part or develop an ECO... if you did it by updating the CAD then the replacement part will fit. If you just freehanded it, the part will not fit.

[brudgers]

I think the market is more towards industrial scale sites like data centers and Amazon warehouses and factories where equipment installation is happening right behind JIT layout.

Places where high precision matters and services aren’t connected to the endpoint at the slab. That’s not most construction because progressive refinement is how most things are built.

[realitysballs]

You have adjusts due to its detectors and it has a prism on it and is being continuously tracked by a total station.

It can correct course due to deviations in floor surface or obstructions pretty well.

[brudgers]

The concern is not the course, but the ability to adjust a layout due to deviations from the plan due to normal construction errors.

For example a pipe might not be in the location shown on plan for many reasons ranging from simple human error to a delta between the plan location when the pipe was layed and the time the robot got its data…keep in mind that when the pipe went in there was only dirt, not anything to accept ink.