Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction

I work for a home builder. Our single biggest problem is finding and hiring quality contractors that have enough skilled tradesmen.

There are dozens of electrical contractors in my area. But only two that perform work to our standards.

There is only one HVAC company that can meet our standards. Same for all of the other skilled trades.

Our framing crew is the best within a 75 mile radius. Other builders are constantly trying to poach them from us. We keep throwing money at them to prevent them from going to another builder.

Non skilled labor like landscaping and pest control are a dime a dozen. I just fired our main pesticide and herbicide contractor today because they couldn’t get it together.

Of course I had them replaced before I fired them but I had almost 20 options to choose from.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about all of the skilled contractors.

I work in commercial real estate.

There are massive amounts of monopoly/duopoly interests in construction. Want to build affordable housing? Well if you are taking public dollars, you have to work with certain vendors which are approved and meet certain qualifications. Guess what, only 2 electrical vendors are approved! And so they work together and act as a racket to hold your project hostage unless you meet them on their terms.

Actually had a call today with an exec with one of the largest construction general contractors and this topic of "we can't do XYZ project [e.g. compete in that type of project type... driving costs down through competition] because we hire ABC union labor and it would screw us and our relations with the unions we work with."

Every developer has a war story of getting burned exactly in some way by being beholden to political or labor issues.

This results in higher costs... which ultimately is one of the main issues among others.

That 7% is for the projects that actually happen. This misses all the projects that don’t when start because they don’t pencil due to the phenomenon that the original poster mentioned.

If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.

Construction costs are not the only costs relating to development and redevelopment. Financing and project risk are also quite significant. Issues that push back the start of construction vastly increase financing costs, and increase construction costs. A delay in getting a permit, or a stop work order because of an environmental lawsuit runs up the interest payments on the loan used to purchase the real estate, as well as increasing the impact of inflation, delaying the revenue, and impacting trades’ schedules, all of which reduce the ROI of the project. These are just some of the issues caused by delays.

You need look no further than the poster child of red tape delayed construction projects: California High Speed Rail.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/us/high-speed-rail-califo...

I’m curious if this is an example of survivorship bias though. I don’t have any data, but I can easily imagine lots of projects not getting built at all due to zoning laws or the red tape cost being too high.

Honestly do you not think what he is saying isn't true?

Do you think they count the items he mentioned in the total costs?

Every major project in America has undocumented costs to go along with the miles of red tape. Just look at California's High Speed Rail.

Where I live they wanted to extend the expressway and it was overwhelmingly supported. So why, 6 years later hasn't it happened? The environmentalist sued to get a survey done that took 2 years to find.... no impact. The county commissioners got voted out and now the new ones want certain promises. The company that got the original no bid contract is owned by a brother of a former commissioner so that led to law suits. People sued because they don't want the new exits to be too close to their house. Others sued because they felt the exits would targets towards higher end homes and didn't equally consider everyone. Then you have the demands that we use ONLY AMERICAN LABOUR!!! and ONLY AMERICAN MATERIALS!!! A state representative said they would boycott the expansion unless a certain percentage of his constitutions were hired to do the work regardless of their qualifications. Another said they would block it due to road noise and complaints from his constitutions unless compensation was made.

It goes on and on and each one costs money they don't count in the official budget.

Where I am it's $90,000 - $240,000 to subdivide land from one to two.

Not including costs post-subdividing like selling the empty lot and tax's.

Obviously the new buyer has building costs, but you might have to demolish the existing house to divide, good chance it was in the middle.

On top of all this is the years to divide the property.

On top of all this you can't then build what you want on the new property.

On top of all this is the years to build on the empty lots.

These all have a $$$ cost.

$240,000 to quickly divide and rebuild high density, no one would care about that cost, that's ~$0.

So the houses you can end up with can't be tight practical buildings, it's $$$$$ for permits and land and time. So this robot will help build mega mansions for single families.

More than just red-tape there's whitecollar processes in pre-construction that take months. Just estimating the cost of each subtrade is a process currently done by hand on blueprints (what I work on automating).

`white_collar_automation * robotics_automation = building more, cheaper`

> A big part of this is obviously (union) labor

I live in Wyoming. We don’t have many unions. The cost scourge is still there due to red tape and general fuckery.

I found this interesting:

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/us-construction-has-prod...

If there are no jobs, you don't need unions!

they will put the rules on place for automated tools very easily ( look at how every state is pulling together a patchwork of AI regulation)

CAT, Deere are both doing very interesting things with older autonomy techniques. Deere has acquired several companies, and partnered with others to bring in talent from outside. CAT has worked with outside companies (notably Trimble, Topcon) for key technologies when it makes a big difference. Both are awesome companies, but not AI/ML companies at the core and it'll take a lot of work for them to get there. I think this is very much like the self driving world 10 years ago where OEMs tried very hard to become software companies, but ultimately Cruise and Waymo were the ones that executed.

To the parent posters point though, those manufacturers are holding outsized control over what can be retrofit to their machines, so to disrupt them, you have to make your own machines. Working on and owning heavy equipment myself, I of course have looked at it and thought there's a lot to improve, but at the the same time, I don't really see where the big brain Silicon Valley + venture bucks ethos can be applied to the space, it would be a long and slow grind of doing mostly straightforward mechanical engineering and supply chain/vendor agreements to build something like a bulldozer, just to enter a near impenetrable market due to many existing sunk costs and long relationships between buyers and the existing manufacturers.

Exploring. If these guys bring something to the table, it will become part of one of theirs’ exploration.

Venture dollars won't back those legacy efforts.

This may be an instance of companies not having enough capital or talent to fend off new entrants.

Talent will flock to the new and exciting. The place where they can get the bigger exit and work with the coolest people.

It is if you aren't adverse to training people and living with lower productivity for a few months as they learn. The biggest obstacle to becoming a heavy equipment operator is finding someone willing to put you in heavy equipment without already being an experienced heavy equipment operator. And the machines cost enough money that someone can't afford to just go buy their own excavator and practice, even really old used equipment that leaks fluids and can't run more than 20 minutes without overheating can cost 6 figures, especially if you also need a truck and large equipment trailer to move it. And even if someone likes the job and gets past those obstacles there are other restrictions, like drug usage, that keeps many people out of the business. You went home and smoked a joint last week but this week something broke or went wrong? Well you better hope they don't fear any liability because they will drug test you, fire you, and black list you to shed all liability.

I find this hard to believe, to be honest. The capital costs of the machinery is already such that paying a premium to relocate someone for the duration of the construction is almost certainly not the bottle neck for most construction jobs?

If you have numbers on this, I'm game to see them. Just because I find it hard to believe doesn't mean I think it is impossible.

In China they haven't needed that for the better part of a decade https://en.xcmg.com/en-ap/news/news-detail-626577.htm

If you can automate efficiently enough, you can build far finer structures.

For example look at how detailed the structure and weld arrangement is for modern cars, vs. back when robots only just started to take care of the frame welding on the assembly line.

Or how optical HDMI cables are affordable because they use fully automated UV-cure-resin-glued fiber alignment straight from the cable end into the optoelectronic chips, without needing optical connectors or any other human-labor to get the light path connected up. That's how they manage to do it the conceptually easiest way: amplifier->laser->fiber->photodiode->amplifier, and repeat for the 4 high-speed pairs. Also handing the low speed communication channel separately with just normal wires as signal degradation isn't an issue for that.

Or for example 3d printer infill: that's something no one would do manually in such a way, but if it's just automated it's quite desirable/efficient.

App rental e-scooters: they rely on automation to organize even when parked "pretty much anywhere they're not gonna block traffic", and as such become relevant for even short trips.

If you have an unsupervised robot that lays bricks for you to build up a house, you can get away with smaller bricks (and thus a lighter/cheaper machine needing a smaller crane to lift up/out of higher floors), than if you need a human to supervise it.

Smaller machine if slower means more machines, meaning cheaper production of the machines due to scale.

Auto-feeders for nail guns in construction means more smaller nails as placing 3 in a row takes barely longer than just 2. Especially if the nail gun could, say, run like an optical mouse and automatically trigger at a configured spacing while dragged along a surface with the trigger held down.

Do you know how much California High Speed Rail is over budget?

What if we could bring massive infrastructure projects down from the billions to the millions? Wouldn't that be a great thing for all of society?

What if we could build new power plants, connect all cities with HSR, rebuild all our old bridges, add thousands of new skyscrapers, and do it all under budget?

Think about what steel did for society. Automated construction is the next highest order step function change. It'll be insanely good for society.

True, but they have more freedom to attack low-hanging fruits and build capabilities in order of ease. With a self-driving car, there’s not a whole lot of iteration allowed - you have your capital to do R&D, but eventually investors expect that car to drive on public roads without incident or support, something nobody can do at the moment.

For construction sites, on the other hand, you could (more) easily automate things like dump trucks or material transports using preprogrammed routes and manual triggers when something is done or needed. Then you can iterate on those systems to add more capabilities, more automations, more integrations with other equipment.

Kind of like how tractors have iteratively improved over time because they benefit from a lot of the same limitations as construction sites. At least that’s my thinking on it.