Gritt Robotics retrofits off-the-shelf construction machinery with AI control and has put it to work on utility-scale solar sites run by EPC Burns & McDonnell.

Gritt Robotics retrofits off-the-shelf construction machinery with AI control and has put it to work on utility-scale solar sites run by EPC Burns & McDonnell. The company says it is working with three top-10 solar EPCs to install six million panels — about 2.8 GW — over the next two years. The article ties this to a cited shortfall of 53,000 workers on ongoing projects and an estimate that 41% of construction workers will retire by 2031.

Stage: pilot. A named EPC (Burns & McDonnell) has the systems on its job sites, but the six-million-panel figure is the company's forward plan, not delivered output, and the other two EPCs are not named.

For physical-ai-field-robotics, the notable point is the approach: the source describes retrofitting existing construction vehicles and robotic arms rather than building new ones — Puri names Caterpillar, Bobcat, Kawasaki, FANUC and KUKA as makers whose base platforms need not be reinvented — and writing the control layer, with site awareness of open trenches, people, weather and light. Puri frames the aim as amplifying workers rather than replacing them ("people who can use the tools we are developing to amplify what they're able to do"), which bears on thesis 1 as a vendor statement, not as observed practice.

The source gives no figures on productivity, error rate or how site staff supervise the machines, so nothing here yet shows the human-in-the-loop arrangement on site.