The future of robotics in construction will be defined by quiet improvements that remove friction from everyday work – not humanoids or machines doing backflips.
The conversation around robotics remains fixated on spectacle: the more impressive the demonstration, the more attention it gains. But the most spectacular applications are often the least likely to survive the realities of a construction site. Many ambitious ideas lack the disciplined understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve, and can’t be implemented in practice. Truly transformative technology improves an existing workflow, eliminates an unnecessary step or makes a difficult job safer or more efficient.
The Hollywood effect
A robot can be technically sophisticated but have little commercial value, explains Nathan Kirchner, Vice President, Zabidou. “The backflipping robots are awesome on LinkedIn,” but performative displays can distort how businesses understand the commercial value of automation. As a result, investment conversations become shaped by what robotics could possibly achieve, rather than the simple applications they can do now with immediate operational value.
Kirchner suggests a scale that measures the technology’s readiness level (TRL) and commercial readiness level (CRL) to bypass the “Hollywood effect” that leads companies to “criminally terrible” ideas. Instead, Kirchner urges companies to question how ready a technology can enter an existing operation and improve a certain function immediately.
Construction doesn’t need revolution
Companies often deploy automation at the largest possible scale, believing that redesigning the entire processes to remove human intervention is most economical. Kirchner explains how this is more expensive and unrealistic. Instead, he suggests an approach that starts much closer to the existing workflow by asking: “What can automation make a little bit better today?”
In practice, that could involve automating a single task that workers would rather not do. For example, factory workers who have to manually lift bricks onto a conveyor belt can deploy a robot to perform the same task at roughly the same speed. Viewed in isolation, the productivity gain appears negligible, but further down the workflow, the economics change.
By automating the task, defective bricks were identified and removed earlier in the chain. This eliminated subsequent handling, inspection and rework, along with the machinery and space those activities required. During this project, Kirchner explained that the newly freed space was repurposed as a car park, allowing staff to get to work more easily. What appeared to be a small intervention at a single point in the process changed everything that followed. Therefore, robotics’ greatest potential lies in simplification. “Fundamentally, nothing changes,” says Kirchner. “Just how we get there does.” The resulting robotics may attract little attention, but its impact can compound across the operation.
Why companies keep getting robotics wrong
Companies do not set out to make poor technology decisions. Often they are the result of good intentions compounded by gaps in knowledge. Leaders recognise the potential of robotics, but without a detailed understanding of the operational environment, ambition can lose sight of what is genuinely achievable.
Translation plays a major role. Kirchner compares the robotic deployment to working with someone who speaks French when you speak English. Technical teams understand the engineering constraints but leadership is focused on the outcome. As communication becomes more complex, people naturally gravitate towards what they understand best. This widens the gap between the original ambition and practical delivery.
Hierarchy, social pressure and competing priorities can prevent critical information from reaching the right people at the right time. Nobody needs to make a deliberately bad choice for a project to head in the wrong direction. Small assumptions compound until the proposed solution bears little resemblance to the environment in which it has to operate.
The real barrier
According to Kirchner, the hardest challenge is getting robotics out of demonstrations and into everyday operations. That makes adoption as much a management problem as a technical one.
A viable solution can still fail if teams do not understand its purpose, operational staff are brought in too late or people do not feel able to challenge assumptions. Hierarchy can make this worse when those closest to the work cannot easily reach the people making the decisions.
Kirchner argues that organisations need enough “social permission” for different perspectives to be presented. Technical experts understand what the technology can do, operations understand how the work gets done, but leadership must create the conditions for those perspectives to meet before money is invested.
“It’s a social challenge,” says Kirchner. The companies that make progress will be those that can bring technical capability into the reality of how people already work.
Boring engineering wins
The irony is that successful robotics may be almost invisible. Kirchner describes “boring engineering” as a good outcome, likening it to a bridge: nobody wants it to shake, explode or make the journey exciting. They want to cross safely. Good engineering allows you to walk across without thinking about the enormous amount of work required to make that possible.
The same principle applies to robotics. The strongest applications may never produce an impressive LinkedIn video, but they could remove an inspection stage, catch an error earlier or take an unpleasant task away from a worker. Eventually, people stop noticing the technology altogether because it has simply become part of how the job gets done.
That is a very different future from fleets of humanoid robots replacing construction workers. It is also a far more plausible one where robotics becomes valuable when it disappears into the workflow and leaves the operation slightly better than it found it.
As Kirchner puts it: “You know you’ve done a good job when no one talks about it.”
Join Nathan Kirchner and other industry leaders at The Construction Technology Summit on 28-29 October in Sydney as we explore how AI, automation, and robotics are moving from experimentation to practical implementation across the construction sector.
