Dive Brief:
- Heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar has partnered with FieldAI, which specializes in physical artificial intelligence for robots, to advance automation in its catalog of machines, according to a Wednesday announcement.
- Caterpillar aims to combine its construction industry expertise and operational data with FieldAI’s robot foundation models to allow builders to autonomously run machines across their jobsites, per the announcement. The firms will focus on applications tied to safety, productivity and efficiency.
- The partnership builds on a growing appetite for robotics in construction along with Caterpillar’s own commitments to innovation in the space. At this year’s CES conference, the company introduced a line of intelligent machines that included excavators, loaders and dozers.
Dive Insight:
Some of the early applications for the partnership between Caterpillar and FieldAI include autonomous inspections, jobsite and facility digital twins and enhanced situational awareness to help identify potential risks sooner, per the announcement.
The pair cemented their partnership amid a groundswell of robotics tech on the jobsite. Over the past year, a bevy of construction firms and manufacturers have trialed new technology solutions on their construction sites. Take Bedrock Robotics, for example, which deployed autonomous excavators on the jobsites of builders Zachry Construction and Sundt Construction.
In this case, Caterpillar selected FieldAI for the partnership as a result of the tech firm’s ability to deploy its robots in complex industrial environments, such as construction sites. Some of the main knocks against robotics in construction include a struggle to adapt to jobsites, where conditions can vary wildly from one day to the next, along with contractors’ inability to leverage proprietary data.
With FieldAI, however, Caterpillar claims that the startup can use its robot-agnostic autonomy and foundation models to turn that data into something actionable.
"The future of our industries will be shaped by how effectively we combine human expertise with AI-powered machines," said Jaime Mineart, Caterpillar’s chief technology officer, in the announcement.
