The article “BIM-Driven Layout Robot Saves Time, Money” caught my eye. It describes a cute1 little robot that, given a set of drawings in digital form, will draw the layout for the different trades on the floor. The idea – and it’s a good one – is to reduce the likelihood of spatial conflicts between the requirements of different trades. Side benefits include the lack of handwriting-legibility issues when the robot prints lettering, the lack of geometric inconsistency between the drawings and the layout, and the ability to update the layout immediately upon drawing revision.
This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the idea of regularizing layout using digital files. Some time ago – I’m not sure when, but I’m certain it was pre-Covid, so say 2019 – I walked into an apartment renovation site about a week after interior demo had finished, and there was the layout on the floor, exactly as shown in the drawings. There was no robot involved: the general contractor had taken the digital files and had them printed and stuck to the floor. It was quite impressive: the covering had enough texture to be not slippery, was tough enough to withstand boots and materials, and apparently both stuck as needed and could be peeled up as needed.
So there are two paths to this goal, one of which involves using a robot and the other involves using large sheets of paper.
One last thought: field geometry is a potential weakness of both paths. What happens when the actual site dimensions differ from the drawings? Workers marking the layout on the floor by hand can adapt, by jimmying the dimensions if the discrepancy is small and issuing an RFI if it’s large. Would the robot necessarily recognize a discrepancy if there was no interference with its travels? Would people setting out low-tech paper layout realize there was a problem before all the paper was printed?
- Intentionally cute. It’s shaped like a toaster with wheels, but it has googly eyes on the front. ↩︎
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