THE ROBOTIC (R)EVOLUTION OF CONSTRUCTION

Reinforced concrete is the building block of large-scale construction; rebar is a crucial ingredient for reinforced concrete. To get prefabricated rebar cages onto a construction site would, in theory, make those cranes come down a lot faster, as projects could get completed more efficiently, at less expense, and with a better use of the construction workforce’s time. Toggle’s success could have implications for cities tasked with simultaneously building for the future and maintaining and improving legacy infrastructure.

But of course, adapting robotic technology, creating software, gaining access to design and hardware expertise, and achieving the goal of actually tying rebar presented a daunting range of challenges both technical and practical. In late 2018, Toggle found a first investor in URBAN-X and an academic partner in the Pratt Institute’s Consortium for Research & Robotics—without having to leave Brooklyn. The timing of this collaboration, it seems, was fortuitous.

Cities around the United States and the globe are growing at unprecedented rates, and are expected to keep expanding. In 2018, construction industry spending worldwide amounted to $11.4 trillion. Construction expenditures are expected to reach $14 trillion in 2025. All of this growth comes with climate impacts: the built environment currently accounts for 39 percent of global CO2 emissions, according to a 2017 UN report. If the revolution in concrete and steel that has shaped our planet is to continue, the industry will have to answer a new challenge: How can the architecture, engineering and construction industry, which hasn’t evolved much since the Industrial Revolution, incorporate new and existing technology to build smarter, better, faster?

In partnership with URBAN-X, Cohen and Blank brainstormed new approaches to their hardware and software design that had implications for how their product and services would reach customers. To help solve the complex equation of adapting an outdated but still extremely necessary concept in construction—using reinforced concrete—with an overly taxed workforce, Toggle would perfect construction robotics. This would impact the most fundamental parts of building everything from bridges to skyscrapers.

This idea aligned perfectly with URBAN-X’s mission to help start-ups develop businesses aimed at making cities more efficient and livable, and scale those businesses to 100 cities over a period of five years. “We see ourselves playing a large role in global urbanization and the development of cities, and the infrastructure that the people who live in cities rely upon,” says Toggle CEO and co-founder Dan Blank. “Everything from energy to transportation to water and resiliency. That is because we are as a company focused on bringing greater efficiency to the way that we build with reinforced concrete.”

Efficiency being the keyword. At a time when cranes proliferate across urban skylines, attempting to keep up with demand in rapidly growing cities but also signifying deeper issues about our urban future, there simply aren’t enough humans to finish the job. A reported 200,000 construction job openings went unfilled in 2018, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.

“The construction industry is starting to experience a shift toward prefabrication and modular building across a lot of different categories, and this is helping to alleviate these challenges,” Blank continues, “because if you can manufacture construction materials, elements, even entire buildings or components of buildings offsite and bring them to the site and install them and assemble them, then you can be more efficient.”

Toggle works out of a factory in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn to manufacture rebar cages using a robotic arm, software, tools and learnings from their time at URBAN-X, constructing rebar cages that are shipped to construction and infrastructure project sites, where they are installed before being covered in concrete. It’s a system that is working well in its early stages, says Blank.

However, the issue of automation of work raises questions about the role of humans, the loss of jobs, and the dignity of work. Using robots to complete unwanted and even dangerous tasks makes sense in an industry facing a shortage of workers, but the idea of artificial intelligence as a threat to human employees continues to stoke fear. While Toggle’s goal is to double labor productivity and to increase overall production five times over traditional assembly methods, questions remain.

Bill Gates, hardly a technophobe, has suggested that a “robot tax” on companies could slow the transition to automated workforces. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has made the issue of automation a centerpiece of his campaign, and also asserts that Donald Trump is president today because 4 million jobs were automated out of Democratic strongholds in the Midwestern United States. Automation is not coming — for better and for worse it is here today.

MEET OUR ROBOT COLLABORATORS

URBAN-X’s mechanical engineering expert Dean DiPietro discovered this while trying to reverse-engineer a handheld wire-tying tool to see if he could adapt the mechanics to a robotic arm. He says that while it turned out to be possible in theory, it wasn’t the best solution. “Human hand-eye coordination is a fascinating and complex skill that’s difficult to replicate with a robotic system,” Schwind explains. “Because of the inherent inaccuracy of rebar cages, the robot either needs a sophisticated computer vision system to position its tool precisely, or the tool needs to be able to account for huge tolerances to still make a reliable tie.” Eventually, both paths turned out too tricky to solve during the program, but Toggle is continuing to develop its solution.

The idea of robots augmenting manufacturing tasks isn’t exactly foreign to the team at URBAN-X, which is under the BMW Group umbrella as part of MINI’s Innovation and Strategy practice. Back at headquarters in Munich, digitalization is impacting the entire BMW Group production value chain. From press shop to body shop to paint shop, from assembly to logistics—every stage of production benefits from the use of digital processes.

Toggle has similar goals. “We’ve already been able to demonstrate significant gains in productivity when we apply our robotics and automation technology,” to the rebar manufacturing process, says Blank. “The potential for productivity gains are really enormous. Ultimately, I like to emphasize that that’s what this is really about: We are not trying to automate the entire process so much as augment it in a way that we can add a new set of tools to the construction industry’s toolkit. So that more construction projects can happen simultaneously, so that those projects can be larger, so that the workforce that we do have can be safer, more effective and productive.”

Safety is at the core of Toggle’s mission as well. “We’re focusing in on tasks that are repetitive and also physically difficult or dangerous,” Blank says. “With rebar, a lot of that involves the handling of the material itself—literally the heavy lifting. Rebar is an incredibly heavy and often awkward material to work with because these are very long steel bars that are roughly cut so they’re sharp and often bend at angles that make them even more difficult to maneuver. One of the things we’re doing in our approach to pre-assembling rebar cages is utilizing the industrial robots to lift and position bars so that human workers can come in and make connections between the bars to assemble three-dimensional shapes.”

These advancements are even more notable because they didn’t start with a single transformative invention, but evolved in part during Toggle’s time in the URBAN-X cohort.

Credit this to an unofficial credo at URBAN-X, where “‘not invented here’ is a strategy, not a dirty word.” Toggle took this philosophy to the extreme; the team’s earliest prototypes contained no proprietary technology at all. They simply combined a pair of existing ones — an off-the-shelf robot and a wire-tying tool — to create the first iteration of a novel invention.