Ashlee VanceNYT Best Seller | Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

Autonomous Excavators Revolutionizing Construction with Robotics

14 Aug 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:36

In this interview excerpt, a representative from Gravis Robotics (Speaker A) explains that the company retrofits standard excavators with autonomous technology, turning them into self‑driving robots. The discussion with an interviewer (Speaker B) probes why the construction sector would adopt such automation. The representative cites two major industry challenges: a growing labor shortage that makes it hard to find skilled machine operators, and a long‑standing productivity gap—construction productivity has plateaued while manufacturing has surged thanks to automation. These pressures create demand for autonomous excavators to improve safety, reduce costs, and boost productivity in construction.

So we at Gravis Robotics, we automate heavy construction machines. So we turn an off-the-shelf excavator into an autonomous robot.
And why would people want to do that? Is it mostly just for safety, just for reducing costs?
And there's a lot of challenges in the industry today. So one of them is labor shortage. The companies don't find the people anymore to drive these machines. Also, that if you look at productivity in the construction industry, that stagnates quite a bit, whereas in other industries like manufacturing, we've seen crazy growth in productivity. Through automation and robots, and that hasn't come to construction yet.