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An Interview with Erin Bradner: Using AI to make construction easier

As part of our AI in Your Community series, I sat down to interview Erin Bradner, the Director of Robotics at Autodesk, which aims to solve complex design problems from ecological challenges to smart design practices. Erin has researched topics ranging from from the future of computer-aided design to how to use robots in novel ways to automate processes in manufacturing and construction.

Erin Bradner, Director of Robotics at Autodesk

Tara Chklovski: Tell me about what you’re working on.

Erin Bradner: I’m now the Director of Robotics at Autodesk, where we make professional software for architects, engineers, and animators. And what they’re looking to do is create more flexible manufacturing lines. And in construction, they’re looking to automate aspects of construction that have not been automated before.

In that sense, construction is aiming to be more like manufacturing, with assembly happening off-site to allow you to bring pre-assembled parts onto the construction site and have the construction site become an open-air assembly line. The traditional sort of stick-built architecture where you’re cutting timber on site is inefficient. The construction industry has not received the productivity gains that other fields have received through technology over the last 20 years. It’s been flat, and we’re helping to address that. There are a lot of interesting startups in construction at work too!

Tara Chklovski: Like which ones?

Erin Bradner: Well startups are doing what startups do – they’re laser focused on innovative, focused technology. For example, Built Robotics is looking at autonomous Bobcats to grade a building site. Usually a Bobcat is operated by an engineer and comes in to clear the site, but taking the technology used for autonomous vehicles, like LIDAR and vision sensing, they’ve developed an autonomous Bobcat that can clear the site on its own.

There’s another company called Canvas that’s just getting off the ground and is using soft pneumatic robots that are human-safe and applying them to the construction site to do dirty and repetitive jobs. Their robots are still in development, but they likely requires quite a bit of AI to integrate.

What Autodesk is looking to do, being a software provider, is not to make robots, but rather to connect our CAD software to robots and other machines to make it easier to build what has been designed. Because CAD – computer-aided design software –  is what’s used to specify nearly everything that is manufactured or engineered today. There is CAD to map terrain for those Bobcats, there is CAD for the walls and the floor and other elements of the buildings. We want to bring CAD into these platforms, along with simulations, so you can simulate the robot in its environment before ever running an operation, and also use machine learning to train the robot to complete its tasks.

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