04 — ROBOTICS IN CONSTRUCTION
The future of construction is robotics.
Construction is the largest industry on earth that still moves atoms by hand. A decade of construction software — including products I've led — made the paperwork faster while the site barely changed. The next decade belongs to physical AI: robots that learn from demonstration and work alongside the trades in messy, half-finished buildings. That's where I'm putting my future focus.
THE PROBLEM
Software is only about 2% of construction spend. As Patric Hellermann splits it: 35–40% people, as much again on materials, 10% plant and equipment. A software-only play has a tiny ceiling and leaves the actual work untouched — the prize is the other 98%, and the biggest slice is labour.
THE BET
Bits to atoms. The venture-scale outcome is owning the site outcome: machines that do the work, not software that describes it. Robot learning has just made that possible outside the factory.
MY ANGLE
I've stood on the slab as an engineer and spent ten years shipping software to contractors, so I've seen how new tools really get adopted on site — and why most don't. Now I'm learning the robotics stack hands-on and working out how adoption will unfold: which tasks go first, who buys, and what it takes to enable it.
// WHERE_THE_HOURS_GO
-
Imperial College Robotics Summer School
JULY 2026 · LONDON
Five days going deep on the stack: LiDAR and tactile sensing for unstructured environments, imitation learning for arm control, and the inverse kinematics theory underneath it all.
My group worked with Dr Edward Johns of the Robot Learning Lab on Instant Policy — in-context imitation learning that lets a robot pick up a new task from a demonstration or two, with no further training (the paper won Best Paper at the ICLR 2025 Robot Learning Workshop) — and took second prize.
An excellent programme, run brilliantly by Imperial. I met interesting people from all over the world and a wide range of Imperial academics working across every area of robotics, and we visited many of their labs. I'd highly recommend it.Second prize — my group with our certificates · Photo: Imperial College London In the lab — recording demonstrations with a leader arm The class of 2026 · Photo: Imperial College London -
Desktop masonry with a myCobot 280
SUMMER 2026 · ONGOING
A six-axis arm collected in China last summer, now on the desk beside me and driven from my Mac. The proof-of-concept is tessellation: show it a photo of a pattern and it lays it out in wooden tiles. Detection, calibration and motion are classical vision and geometry; a local vision model reads the reference photo and checks each placement. Learned policies — demonstrations, simulation, sim-to-real — come next, where they beat plain geometry.
-
Where it goes
THE NEXT DECADE
Cobots and mobile manipulators working beside the trades without a factory-floor retrofit: tiling, sorting, material layout, repetitive assembly. Vision-language-action models are what make a robot useful on a site that's different every day. I follow the platforms closely — Unitree quadrupeds, ARCA, NextGen Robotics — and the software and virtualised environments that run them.
// NOTES Happy to compare notes with anyone building robots for real sites — founders, contractors, researchers.
Talk to me on LinkedIn →