Automated Housekeeping with Spot

Automated housekeeping on live construction sites with Skanska. Repeatable autonomous walks by a Boston Dynamics Spot, through terrain and clutter that changes every single day.

Role

Robotics lead at the Autodesk Technology Center Boston, collaborating directly with Skanska on the deployment

Team

Skanska, with the Autodesk Technology Center, Boston

Stack

Boston Dynamics Spot, 360° capture, Newmetrix review tagging

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The problem

Housekeeping, meaning keeping a site clear of hazards and debris, is a safety issue that depends on someone walking the whole site and noticing. A two-day workshop with Skanska, Autodesk Research and Boston Dynamics picked it out of a field of candidate use cases, and it got a six-month research and testing window across the Technology Center and live Skanska sites in Boston.

The robot ran the walk instead of a person, capturing 360° imagery that was then reviewed and tagged for housekeeping issues at roughly ten seconds per photo.

On one review pass, 11 of 378 photos were flagged as high-confidence housekeeping issues, and all 11 turned out to be real. A low hit rate is the point: the robot walks so a person doesn't have to, and the person only looks at the 3%.

What broke, and what didn't

The split was not what you'd guess. Rough terrain was mostly a solved problem. Stairs, rocks, pipes, steep hills, mud, metal decking, tight spaces and empty offices all went fine.

What defeated it was everything transparent, floppy, or tangling: glass walls and clear partitions it couldn't perceive, plastic sheeting, cardboard rolls, power cords, hoses, and caution tape. A legged robot on a construction site isn't beaten by the terrain. It's beaten by the temporary stuff people leave lying around, which is precisely what changes every day.