Contractor robot use grew 45% in a year, and autonomous excavators reached live jobsites

Construction Dive reported on 19 August 2026 that BuiltWorlds 2026 benchmarking found contractor robotics use up 45% year on year, with pilot-only adoption close to tripling. Bedrock Robotics, founded by Waymo alumni, is running fully autonomous excavators for contractors Sundt and Zachry; Gravis Robotics took a $200M Series A from SoftBank and FieldAI has raised $405M across consecutive rounds — close to $1bn across the three. The wins so far are narrow repeatable tasks: layout, drilling, drywall finishing.

What it means The useful part is the shape of the wins: start on repetitive controlled tasks, and expect your own data quality to be the limiter rather than the machine.