By now most of you have heard about Spot, the agile mobile robot created by Boston Dynamics. If you saw Spot do his dance at either of the last two ConExpo shows, you were probably thinking: Clever, but is it practical? The answer is yes if you like to stay ahead of schedule and hate cost overruns and rework.

The Mace Group, a tech-oriented construction company out of Dublin, Ireland, recently wrapped up its first project using Spot and Trimble technology. What they found was that, as intended, Spot does what robots are supposed to do: take over the tedious and time-consuming chores to free up humans to do more value-added work.