FieldAI Brain Enables Efficiency for Robotic Platforms in Construction: A Case Study with DPR.
Construction is one of the world’s largest industries, with a market size of $13.4 trillion in 2025 and projected to reach $20.6 trillion by 2033. Yet despite its scale, it remains one of the least digitized sectors, challenged by inefficiencies, safety risks, and ongoing labor shortages. To meet growing demand and deliver with greater precision, companies across the sector are increasingly turning to robotics and automation.
This kind of transformation points to a broader shift already underway. AI-powered robotics are tackling the inefficiencies that have long challenged construction, paving the way for a safer and more productive industry standard. FieldAI’s strategic partnership with DPR Construction shows how general contractors can unlock these benefits on real jobsites today.
The Challenges of Building Today
On a typical jobsite, whether it be a data center, hospital, or office high-rise, project engineers spend hours each day walking the floor with a 360° camera, capturing video or stopping at key points to capture photos for documentation. This manual process can stretch across days or even weeks before a complete data set is available for review.
In the meantime, the site continues to evolve, often by the time images are uploaded and processed, the captured conditions are already outdated. FieldAI automates this time-intensive task through robotics and AI, freeing teams to focus their time on reviewing, analyzing, and acting on fresh, accurate information rather than repeatedly collecting it.
At the same time, safety risks are ever-present. In the U.S. alone, the construction industry records roughly 40,000 injuries and more than 1,000 deaths per year. Every missing handrail, open slab edge, or chemical spill is a potential hazard.
And then there’s the labor shortage. Even as demand for new housing, infrastructure, and commercial builds grows, the industry faces a shrinking workforce. The U.S. will need an estimated 500,000 additional workers in 2025 to meet demand. Skilled tradespeople are retiring faster than new workers are entering the field, and while general contractors are working hard to recruit the next generation, most agree it will take years to hire enough to meet demand.
Lastly, there’s sheer inefficiency. For example, moving materials from one place to another takes up time and adds no value to the actual build. Between limited labor availability and wasted hours, too many projects lose momentum before they’ve even hit their stride.
From Risk to ROI: How Robotics Creates Connected Jobsites
Enter FieldAI-enabled robots: solving for short-staffed construction sites, unsafe conditions, and lagging processes. By taking on repetitive and hazardous tasks, they provide general contractors with a reliable, cost-effective way to stay on top of progress, avoid costly mistakes, and keep projects moving, even when managers can’t be on site.
FieldAI’s autonomy is built for the realities of construction. Job sites are constantly changing, with layouts shifting daily. Unlike systems that depend on GPS, prior maps, or fixed paths, FieldAI adapts on the fly, enabling reliable autonomy in dynamic and dangerous environments.
But the value goes beyond time savings. With FieldAI-enabled robots, teams receive a continuously updated source of truth: a living digital record of the job site. Every captured photo, scanned square foot, or walked mile adds to an integrated dataset that tracks progress, documents every change, and can be referenced months or even years later.
Standardizing this data capture is key. During a rapidly evolving construction project, how you process data is directly tied to how you capture it. By automating collection, teams can enable accurate deviation analyses, proactively flag risks, and protect project margins by catching issues early. This creates a financially sustainable process that scales across hundreds of job sites, improving accuracy and efficiency across the board.
Because the same robot can perform multiple tasks simultaneously, like progress tracking, hazard detection, security checks, and even material movement, the ROI multiplies. Instead of siloed, single-purpose, manual workflows, builders get an integrated, general-purpose, data-rich record of their project that fuels smarter, faster decision-making.
On the Job with DPR: Robotics in Action
Before FieldAI, DPR engineers walked hundreds of thousands of square feet with cameras to capture site progress on a data center site. Now, they simply set a mission on the dashboard, and the robot walks the site autonomously. What once consumed hours of human time now runs quietly in the background, freeing project managers and general contractors to focus on problem-solving and coordination.
During a phase of deployment, FieldAI covered serious ground:
- 45,000+ photos captured for documentation and analysis
- 100+ miles walked across the jobsite
- 4 full floors mapped
- 125,000 square feet of roofing documented
- 500,000 square feet of interiors scanned
DPR Senior Superintendent on the project, Justin Schreiner, shares that “The FieldAI system makes us better at what we do. Giving us greater efficiency, helping us document items more effectively, and taking some of the more mundane tasks off our plate, letting us focus on the more detailed, critical tasks. As the FieldAI system develops, I think it will allow our teams to focus on building safer and higher-quality projects.”
Blueprint for the Road Ahead
Field AI’s collaboration with DPR is proof of what’s possible: large-scale, multi-purpose, and safe autonomy that reshapes how construction projects are managed. As adoption grows globally, the industry will move closer to a reality where autonomous mapping is the norm, safety oversight is continuous, and project teams spend less time documenting and more time building.
Most importantly, robotics is here to make building more efficient and safer. By taking on repetitive, hazardous, or time-intensive tasks, robots free up people to focus on what matters most: building safer, higher-quality projects. Construction may be one of the oldest industries, but with robotics, it’s on the verge of one of the biggest breakthroughs yet.
