Future Construct: Thought Leaders Discuss BIM and Construction Solutions for the AEC Industry
The Future Construct podcast features thought leaders from around the world working on innovative technology solutions for the construction (AEC) industry. This podcast is hosted by Amy Peck, CEO of EndeavorVR, and Mark Oden, CEO of BIM Designs, Inc., and is produced by the team at BIM Designs, Inc. Amy is a recognized thought-leader and speaks globally on the future of VR, AR and emerging technologies including AI, blockchain, robotics and autonomy. Mark leads the growth, strategy and execution of BIM Designs, Inc.; his acute ability to develop and implement strategic processes that scale the company's capabilities, drives efficient service delivery, increases client satisfaction, and builds cross-functional teams. The podcast has already featured industry experts from Fortune 500 companies, venture capital firms, and construction startups. To suggest a guest or to be featured as a guest, visit https://www.bimdesigns.net/futureconstruct.
Future Construct: Thought Leaders Discuss BIM and Construction Solutions for the AEC Industry
From Childhood Coding to Construction Innovation: Tessa Lau's Robotics Revolution
Ever wondered how early childhood experiences can shape a career in cutting-edge technology? Join us for an inspiring conversation with Tessa Lau, a trailblazer in the realms of computer science, robotics, and entrepreneurship. From her first lines of code on a RadioShack color computer to her pioneering work at Dusty Robotics, Tessa's story is a testament to the transformative power of passion and innovation. Discover how her time at IBM Research and Willow Garage set her on a path to make a tangible impact through robotics, including a life-changing project to assist individuals with disabilities. Tessa's journey is a captivating blend of personal anecdotes, professional milestones, and a relentless drive to push the boundaries of what's possible.
In this episode, we also explore the formidable challenges and exhilarating triumphs Tessa encountered while bringing groundbreaking technology to the construction industry. Learn about the intricacies of Savioke's robot elevator programming and the strategic alliances Dusty Robotics has forged to navigate the complex landscape of technological adoption in construction. Dive into the future of nanorobotics in healthcare, where tiny robots could revolutionize medical treatments and extend human life. Finally, Tessa shares her visionary insights into automating the BIM coordination process and the potential personal benefits of emerging technologies over the next 25 years. This episode offers a fascinating glimpse into the future of robotics and its transformative potential across multiple sectors.
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Welcome to the Future Construct podcast. I'm your host, Mark Oden, and today I have the honor of speaking with Tessa Lau, a renowned computer scientist, roboticist and entrepreneur, and also a prior guest of Future Construct from season one. Tessa is the founder and CEO of Dusty Robotics, a company revolutionizing the construction industry with its innovative robotic solutions. With a PhD in machine learning and extensive experience in artificial intelligence, Tessa has been at the forefront of robotics development, from her work at IBM Research and Willow Garage to her pivotal role in deploying delivery robots at Savioke. Her groundbreaking work at Dusty Robotics is transforming how we approach construction projects. Thank you for all your many contributions in the AEC space and welcome to the show, Tessa.
Speaker 2:Thank you, mark, happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go ahead and get started. I want to, as I always love to do, start in the early childhood years and think about what your aspirations were then. So, tessa, can you tell us about your earliest memories of being fascinated by technology or robotics?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I started off in computers. I got into robotics much later, mid-career, but my early technology memories were of learning how to program computers. So my dad got us a RadioShack color computer. I remember it had 64 kilobytes of RAM, which was a lot back then, and we had a subscription to a magazine that had like source code listings in it and I would dutifully type in all of those lines of code into the computer and it would do something magical. That you know, this seems really, really cool. I could make this device do this thing just by typing at it, and so that's what launched me into a career in tech and eventually into robotics.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that, Tessa. Yeah, I think that's incredible, 64 kilobytes of RAM being a lot. That's just you know. It's funny how fast it all moves really in the end. So, staying in the childhood theme, what were some of your dreams and aspirations and did?
Speaker 2:you always envision yourself in technology, or were there?
Speaker 1:other, you know, were there other dreams astronaut, firefighter, whatnot?
Speaker 2:I wanted to be a pilot for a while. I wanted to be an author for a while because I really love writing and I just never imagined I would be a CEO or run a technology company. It was just like so far out of the realm of what little kids like me could do that I just never imagined anything like this. Well, I can see the autobiography coming in another 10 years or so. I've got a lot of stories built up so eventually they'll come out Well, good, good.
Speaker 1:Were there any specific events or influences during your childhood that set you on this path and into technology? And you know you mentioned the, you mentioned the computer that your dad gave you. Any other specific milestones or events?
Speaker 2:I mean, the only other thing I remember really is is just like, uh, what got me into technology and I think a lot of kids too is video games. Uh, and I don't think people appreciate the impact that gaming has on the technologists that we have today. Right, oftentimes that's people's first uh touch or first way to interact with anything technologically cool. Video games always push the envelope of what's possible, and so I remember, like, having an 8-bit nintendo back in the day that I just thought was the coolest thing, right, um, because all of these games that came out for it were just like, so advanced for the time. And that's what got me into programming, because I wanted to build my own. And so I think a lot of kids probably share that same path. You know, they want to create something cool, they want to tell a story, they want to build something that no one's ever seen before, and that's what got me in for sure.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Yeah, certainly for me too. I can relate Video games is what drove me into building computers and learning basic programming and scripting and eventually you know website development and everything was all because of. You know video games and the community that was built around it. Yeah, that was a huge part of my childhood and eventually graduated out of it myself. But you know, I appreciate so much and now I feel behind the times, right, I mean, like you said, video games are always pushing the edge of technology and moving it forward. So, yeah, I'm proud of everybody in that space. Well, so you've grown up since then and you've had a remarkable career journey, and you know you've been at, as mentioned, ibm Research and Willow Garage. What are some particularly challenging moments at either of those two spaces and how did you overcome it?
Speaker 2:challenging moments at either of those two spaces, and how did you overcome it? I think one of the. I want to tell the story about how I get into robotics, because that kind of like blends the how I got to where I am with some of the challenges. So my first job out of school was at IBM research. I spent 11 years there doing research in human computer interaction and and AI and and after what felt like a whole career at IBM, I wanted to do something different and so I decided to get into robotics. And the reason I got into robotics as opposed to anything else was because I heard about this project at Willow Garage that was called Robots for Humanity and the intent of the project was to work with this person with disabilities. He was a quadriplegic, bound to a wheelchair, couldn't move his hands or anything other than a little bit of a finger and his eyes, and they were allowing him to program a robot to help himself with activities of daily living. And that kind of blew my mind, because I've worked in software pretty much my entire career up to that point and all of the things that I built. I built a lot of things, but they were living behind a screen, they couldn't touch the world, and so that really inspired me to get into robotics, because I realized that robots can actually touch the world. They can actually make things happen in reality, not just virtually. And so I got into robotics.
Speaker 2:It was a really tough learning curve Like there's a lot to learn about robotics, and I kind of had to like start from scratch and learn a lot of things you know from, from the basics, but it, you know, led me to the point where I am today, and so it's definitely worth it. But it's overcoming that feeling of like you're starting from zero again. You're starting as like a complete noob in a new area, a new domain where everyone else knows a lot more than you do. There's a lot of imposter syndrome in there. There's a lot of fear that you're not going to be able to catch up, but when you push through it you can actually make some really interesting progress.
Speaker 1:And congratulations on your perseverance as well. I'm thinking about the PhD component to what you have, and you know that's just an envelope of saying you know, hey, I can take uncharted territories and learn so much about it. So congratulations on that, tessa.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:So prior to Dusty Robotics, you were also the CTO at Savvy Oak, where you deployed over 75 delivery robots in the hospitality industry, so I'd love to learn more about the experience there and also what was the most rewarding part of that experience for you.
Speaker 2:So Savvy Oak came out of Willow Garage. So, as Willow was shutting down, so Willow was the premier research lab for robotics at the time and they ran out of money, decided to shut down, and a number of us at Willow decided to start a new company, savvy Oak, to commercialize some of the technology that we developed at that research lab. And so we settled on hotel delivery, because we've all stayed in hotels you all need to, you know, have left your toothbrush at home and you need a little emergency delivery in the middle of the night. And so we thought that that would be a good thing to build, because it would make use of the navigation capabilities that that we were developing for robots at that time. And you know, with our robotics arrogance, we thought, with our, uh, robotics arrogance, we thought, oh yeah, navigation is a solved problem, so it should be really easy to build this robot, right? Uh, yeah, no. So, um, we, uh. One of the biggest things that I learned there is that when you try the first time, you try to bring a technology out into the world, the first time you try to bring a technology out into the world, the hard parts come when you actually get the 20% at the end, right? So 80% of it's, you know, pretty straightforward. It's like the middle of the road use case it's that 20% that can kill you.
Speaker 2:And so for us at Savio, that 20% was dealing with the elevators.
Speaker 2:Because if imagine you're in a hotel and you need to get from the front desk up to the room, typically that revolves an elevator trip, right?
Speaker 2:And so one of the things I'm most proud of at Savioke was doing the human robot elevator interaction programming a robot to take the elevator like a human does. And if you think about it, it's kind of complex, right? When you walk into an elevator, you turn around to face the door, so in order for our robots to and you have to sometimes wait for other people to get off before you can get off, or if you're in the front and someone behind you needs to get out, right, maybe you have to step off the elevator and get back on. We've all been in these situations, right? And so, if you think about how complex those situations are, it's really hard to program a robot to know what to do in all of those different situations. And so that was, you know, watching our robots take elevators and behave politely, despite the amount that guests have been drinking on that elevator. That's been a real, that was a real success for us, I think, and I was really proud of that.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic, and so where did that end up going?
Speaker 2:So Savio, rebranded as Relay Robotics, still going, and so I left after five years because I wanted to pursue other dreams. But I wish them the best of luck. They're still plugging away at it.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Thanks for sharing that story. So starting Dusty Robotics from scratch, securing funding and building a great brand and reputation is no small feat. Since you were last on our show in season one, what were some of the biggest obstacles you've encountered at Dusty Robotics and how have you navigated them, Tessa?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I was on your show a couple of years ago and in a startup, each month feels like a year, so it feels like a really long time ago. We've made some amazing progress since then, but also solved a number of really significant challenges. I think the thing I'm most proud of of having worked through is hiring a really, really good team. I think the team is what makes the startup. It's what gets me out of bed every day to come to work and work with this group, and my team is the one that's actually doing most of the work and actually solving those hard problems for me.
Speaker 2:One of the things I realized is that, as CEO, my job becomes less and less Over time. It becomes less doing and it becomes more judgment and vision and managing, and so right now, the hard parts of my job is making sure I have the right people in the right roles to do the right things for the company, and so that's an ongoing set of challenges. We're constantly looking for good talent and defining what we want them to do and bringing them in, and so I would say some of the biggest challenges I've had are, essentially, designing the organization to accomplish the goals that I have for the company and then finding the right people to fill those roles inside the organization, and I'm really, really happy with what we've been able to accomplish there.
Speaker 1:And likely. I'm proud of you, tessa, and I'm proud of your team as well. You know what the impact I've seen you make in the industry over the last two years from the outside in has been astronomical. You know it's been amazing for me to sit in SMACNA association meetings and then talk about the training that's about to be delivered to union members, about Dusty Robotics and that there's. The speed at which you've been able to move in this industry and help bring positive momentum and positive change in this industry has been really awe-inspiring from the outside in. So I just want to say how proud I am of you and your team for the progress that they've made.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'd love to give a shout out to our head of training, marshall Hawley. So a lot of that work has been his idea and his doing, and so I'm super happy to say that we're now working with several unions, not just in California but all across the West Coast at this point, and Marshall has created a fantastic curriculum for them to use to teach to their membership, and that's part of the way we're scaling this up. We can't personally touch every single person who's going to use and operate our system, and so the way for us to scale ourselves is to work through the unions, get their trainers on board to teach our product, and Marshall's been fantastic at getting all of that off the ground and going.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so cool to see from the outside in Tessa. It's just amazing, yeah, and well done Marshall as well. So, speaking of the construction industry, it definitely has a perception of being relatively slow to adopt new technologies. What do you see as the biggest barriers to technological adoption and construction, and how is Dusty Robotics addressing and breaking down those barriers?
Speaker 2:I think the biggest barrier is that stuff just doesn't work. Let me expand a little bit on that.
Speaker 2:So, building a product is hard, and building a product that people want is even harder, and if you can manage to do both of those, then you can win, and that's what we've done.
Speaker 2:And I think the reason why construction tends to be very suspicious of new technology is because they've probably been promised a lot of things that don't actually pan out. The products don't actually live up to the promises, or maybe the product doesn't actually do what construction companies need it to do, and so I think one of the reasons we've gotten so far as we have is because we listen really closely to what our customers need. We really understand their pain points. We hire from the construction industry, so we have a lot of that expertise in-house and we have a philosophy of building something that's 10x better than what the industry is doing today, and if it's not 10x better, then it's not meeting our goals for that product. So what that means is that anything that you get from Dusty is guaranteed to give you a 10x improvement, and for most of our customers that means 10x speed, accuracy and much better communication as well.
Speaker 1:Very exciting, yeah, and I hear what you're saying when you're saying you know, hey, is the product of need, Is it exactly what I want? And then is it going to perform and deliver to the expectations that I have or that have been set for an environment that's mission critical right, and things need to work. Things need to produce mission critical right and things need to work, things need to produce. So, in your opinion, speaking about other technologies in the AEC or architecture, engineering and construction space, what do you see outside of robotics that appears most promising and more trending towards?
Speaker 2:you know, towards adoption in the next few years. Yeah, and I just want to underscore what you just said, because that is so true, right, part of the reason why it's hard to get new technology into construction is because the risk profile in construction projects is just so painful in the layout business, right? So I hear a lot of layout stories and I've heard stories about construction companies that go out of business because they made a mistake in layout, right, and that's a big deal. If you can kill your company because of just this tiny little thing, that's huge. And so people are very risk averse, right, because a mistake can cost them not just their job, but it could cost them their company.
Speaker 2:So I totally get why people are not willing to take as many risks in construction, and so that's why our philosophy is trying to minimize that risk, right. In fact, we're giving you technology that decreases your risk it doesn't increase it, right. So that's just how I think about construction technology adoption. So you asked what other technology is coming down the line. Everyone's talking about AI these days, and I'm sure that's actually going to make a huge impact in construction. I'm actually tracking some really interesting use cases applications for it, the two that I'm really excited about right now. One of them is generative AI for modeling.
Speaker 2:And so Hypar and TestFit are the two ones that I'm super interested in there, because they're basically helping architects and designers and detailers create better designs by using AI to generate the starting point for those designs, in some cases, maybe even like a full-on, fully populated out 3D design, and so that's going to save a lot of time. It's going to eliminate a lot of errors that happen during the design phase, so I'm really excited about that. And then the second area that I'm really excited about is companies like Trunk Tools that are using AI to create a conversational interface to your construction documents. So, instead of your superintendent having to pull up Procore and scroll through a lot of different documents in order to find the information they need, they can just ask a question of like a chat GPT type AI, and it searches through all those documents for you, gives you the right answer, saves you a huge amount of time.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Yeah, thanks for sharing those insights and also specific companies to look after.
Speaker 2:Looking ahead and coming back into robotics, what are your to ask the question of what robots are you using? Because we don't ask do your tools use electricity? And it's kind of taken for granted that they do, and it becomes a foundational technology that just gets baked into every single product. The same way, there's a battery and electrical power on your power tool right, there's going to be robotics embedded in your power tool. And so the way I see that playing out like, if I think about my life right now, you know I drive a Tesla, which is a big self-driving robot. It's like a car, but it's got sensors and it can take a lot of decisions on its own and gets better over time and it's on track to becoming fully autonomous for this one particular use case right, I'm not going to get it to build a house for me, but for that one use case that it's designed for, it's doing that really, really well and it's using robotic technology in order to do that.
Speaker 2:Another example is my Nest thermostat. It's got sensors and knows how warm the house is, knows when it needs to turn on the heat or turn on the AC, and it acts in response in order to deliver a certain outcome that I want it to, and so those are all characteristics of robotics that are using technology that was originally developed in the robotics field, and we're starting to see those in everyday products today, and so my future of robotics is that you're not gonna see necessarily a humanoid robot wandering around doing all these things, but the technology that you already use on a daily basis is going to start incorporating robotic features in it, and they're going to be little robots.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Thank you for sharing that vision of the future. I think of my mind also goes to sort of nanorobots. Where are your thoughts on that? I was just reading an article that that could sort of you know, nanorobots could help organs, you know, stay healthy and have humans live for a long time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you see a correlation any of that, or is that too far away?
Speaker 2:I admit I find the concept of having little robots like crawling around in my bloodstream. I find that kind of creepy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not the only one. The author of the article said something very similar. It's like is that going to be accepted? But yeah, I'm very curious about the world of nanorobots and how far away humanity might be from that concept.
Speaker 2:Well, I am excited about the surgical robots. One of my friends just had heart surgery right, and they don't open your heart anymore. They they send a little device up, you know, into your artery, through your arteries, in order to do whatever it is they need to do on the inside, and that's like so much easier to heal from right. It's much less invasive and that's possible because of the precision of those little robotic devices that can more autonomously perform certain actions inside the body, and so that's exciting yeah I'll get sick at some point.
Speaker 1:We're all going to need medical care, and the better that is, the better we all are absolutely and for them to not have to do the open heart, the open, open chest portion of the of the surgery I mean that you know, probably saves months of recovery. Um well, how do you, uh, how do you envision dusty robotics evolving over the next few years, and at what impact do you do you feel like you will have, or hope to have, on the construction industry over the next few years?
Speaker 2:So I think Dusty is in a really interesting space, because where we've started, which is this problem of layout, is this kind of critical junction right now where the digital world meets the analog world of the field, and where I want Dusty to go. My vision for Dusty is because we've started in the middle. Here we have the opportunity to both go upstream of where layout happens, as well as downstream of where layout happens, and so if you think about what happens upstream, well, where does the file come from that our robots print? Right, that's an output of the design process, of the BIM coordination process. There's a lot of people working together in order to create that data that our robots print on the ground, and right now, all of those processes are still very manual. I still see people schlepping files around on a USB key or in email. I still see phone calls being made to coordinate and discuss things, and so how can we automate that?
Speaker 2:That is a process that we're looking into as a company right now. We're starting to build some tools that help streamline that BIM coordination process in order to get all the trades on board and all of the information lined up in the right way so that when you actually do go to print it. You're confident that that's exactly what you want to build. So that's one thing, and then, downstream, I'm also really excited about other use cases. So we have lots of ideas about other robots we could build. I'm not going to talk about any of them today, but if you think about it, the BIM model is the instruction manual for the building that you want to build, right, that tells you exactly what you want to build, and once you have those instructions which we do because of the nature of our job that is basically telling future robots what they need to do and where.
Speaker 1:Very cool. I'm so excited and I'm happy to see you expanding to, you know, the broader spectrum of the industry challenges. Well, tessa, as a final question of the show, and a traditional future construct, if you could project yourself out 25 years and wanted to have any device or technology that would benefit you personally, what would it be and what would it do?
Speaker 2:no-transcript.
