With an eye on growing its product line beyond its existing outdoor surveying and layout robot, San Francisco-based startup Civ Robotics announced July 1 that it has secured $7.5 million in Series A funding, in a round led by AlleyCorp with investments from Bobcat Co. and ff Venture Capital, bringing the company’s total funds raised to date to $12.5 million.
Civ Robotics’ small, wheeled, outdoor layout robot, called CivDot, allows for automated layout of survey points with a high degree of precision, reducing the number of workers needed to mark out sites. The robot is able to mark layout points using onboard spray paint with an 8-mm accuracy, the company says. Rugged enough to work in inclement weather and on uneven ground conditions, a CivDot can mark up to 3,000 points per day.
“We have over 100 robots [out in the field] right now, mostly used in the renewable energy sector, oil and gas, highways and airports,” says Tom Yeshurun, CEO and co-founder of Civ Robotics. Each robot uses a combination of an onboard RTK receiver connected to a nearby base station and onboard IMU sensors to precisely orient itself on project sites.
Yeshurun adds that CivDot robots are platform agnostic, and can be used alongside existing popular survey equipment and software from Topcon, Trimble and Leica. They also do not require a detailed BIM or other complex design files to begin layout operations. “When our customers use us, the robot doesn’t care what it is marking. We’re just providing a tool.”
Yeshurun notes that while CivDot generates an as-built of a site with a topographical overlay while it is performing its layout activities, many customers aren’t interested in doing anything with that level of reality capture and just want the layout done. “Some absolutely love that [deliverable] and some don’t care at all.”
Civ Robotics' layout robots have been used in large installations for wind and solar as well as the oil and gas sector.
Photo courtesy Civ Robotics
One of Civ Robotics largest customers is contractor Bechtel, which has several of the CivDot robots. “On the utility-scale solar projects we work on, being able to save time while maintaining high standards is a godsend,” Kelley Brown, Bechtel’s principal vice president U.S. renewables, said in a statement about Civ Robotic’s latest funding round. “By improving our survey time sixfold, Civ Robotics has helped us keep our projects on schedule. We’ve relied on CivDot for four years so far and will continue to implement the bots across our organization.”
The new funding round is expected to boost Civ Robotics as the company is expanding its product line, Yeshurun says. The company plans to announce a new product related to jobsite autonomy later this summer.
While there are many companies bringing robotic autonomy to jobsite layout and outdoor surveying, Yeshurun says there are still many activities on the site beyond surveying that could be improved with greater automation and more consistent performance.
Yeshurun says contractors often don’t know who the equipment operator will be until the job starts, which can limit them from planning productivity. “ With the autonomy of [technology like] CivDots, [they] already know the level of productivity," he adds.
