From Equipment World by Tom Jackson.
The Mace Group, a tech-oriented construction company out of Dublin, Ireland, recently wrapped up its first project using Spot and Trimble technology. What they found was that, as intended, Spot does what robots are supposed to do: take over the tedious and time-consuming chores to free up humans to do more value-added work.
Celtic name for an Irish dog
The name “Spot” is the product name given to this four-legged robot by Boston Dynamics, but in keeping with Irish mythology and legends, Mace decided to name their canine Setanta, after a mythical Irish warrior who became a king’s watchdog.
The process of putting Setanta to work at Mace began with a lot of discussions starting in 2019. “We spent a year talking back and forth and figuring out how to make the application work within Mace’s workflows,” says David Burczyk, construction robotics lead for Trimble. Covid slowed progress so there was a lot of upfront planning before Trimble and Mace could physically get together as a team and start interacting with the robot.
When Trimble and Boston Dynamics co-developed the integration of Spot and the Trimble X7 3D laser scanner, that solution gave Mace the combination of technologies it needed to speed up the process. “That was the step change that we were looking for,” says Kieran Heffernan, associate director of construction at Mace. “We wanted a process that compared the automated laser scan capture and analysis against the BIM model.”
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