As part of Boston Dynamics’ Early Adopter Program, Foster + Partners has been exploring the use of Spot®, the agile robot that climbs stairs and traverses rough terrain with ease as a tool to capture and monitor progression on-site. The practice’s Applied Research + Development group (ARD) has been working with Boston Dynamics to explore the potential of a robot in a dynamic environment such as a construction site, capturing changes on a regular basis, and being able to easily compare the ‘as-designed’ models against the ‘as-built’ reality.

Construction sites are inherently dynamic environments, where changes need to be tracked and measured on a regular basis, capturing errors in time to meet the project timeframe and budget. With several contractors working in tandem on site, there is a need for a process that can allow for constant, quick and consistent precision monitoring of the works, which can ensure that potential deviation from the design – which may affect later works – can be picked up on time. Sequential scans also help supervise procurement and logistics and ensure that timeframes can be kept under check. If done manually, the process is time consuming and may potentially yield scans that cannot be easily compared against each other. Spot can be controlled remotely, is terrain-agnostic and can also repeatedly follow a pre-mapped route – while avoiding obstacles or even climbing stairs – making it an optimal tool to be used to scan building sites on a regular basis with minimum resources and time.