The Robot Report Podcast Building Tomorrow: How Bedrock Robotics is Changing the Construction Industry
Mar 20, 2026
Boris Sofman, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics who builds autonomy for heavy construction machines. He discusses making excavators and bulldozers operatorless. He draws lessons from Waymo and explains retrofit upfits, safety-first AI practices, and how one supervisor could orchestrate many machines. He outlines market urgency, scaling oversight, and plans to move to fully operatorless deployments.
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Autonomous Driving Methods Translate To Construction
- Bedrock applies data-driven ML approaches from autonomous driving to heavy machinery autonomy.
- Boris Sofman explains the same foundation of driving generalizes across environments and platforms, enabling faster scaling from one machine type to many.
Construction Market Has Structural Urgency For Automation
- Construction has tailwinds that make autonomy transformational: large GDP share, massive labor shortages, and a surge in demand from sectors like data centers.
- Sofman cites 800,000 worker shortage and $700B of new construction driving urgent need for automation.
Operator Means Goal Driven Autonomy Not Low Level Commands
- Bedrock's operator is a software-driven 'digital operator' trained from large human datasets to accept goals and execute complex tasks.
- Example: give a 5-foot cut goal and the system handles truck loading, digging, and soil responses autonomously.