Dusty FieldPrinter 2

The robot that prints the drawings onto the slab

Construction layout is the step outsiders never see and insiders dread: taking the wall lines, door and window positions, and MEP penetrations off a BIM model and transferring them, inch by inch, onto the concrete slab so every trade builds to the same marks. The traditional method is a crew with a tape measure and a chalk box, on their knees snapping lines, taking days per floor and reworking whenever a human error creeps in. The Dusty FieldPrinter 2 does this job — except it doesn’t measure or snap. It prints.

It’s a 23-pound wheeled robot that reads from a coordinated BIM model and inkjet-prints the full-scale floor plan straight onto the slab — wall lines, door and window openings, MEP penetrations, finish boundaries, every trade’s marks in a single pass. Vendor-stated positional accuracy is 1.6 mm (about 1/16 inch), guided by a laser tracker, printing at 300 dpi. One person operates it and lays out 10,000 to 15,000 square feet a day. It’s smaller than the first generation, so it works around obstacles, prints closer to edges, and “shadow prints” behind columns.

Which hours it replaces

Layout sits between skill and labor: you have to read the drawings, and you have to spend hours on the slab measuring and snapping. FieldPrinter 2 pulls out the second half — the repetitive, error-prone, knee-wrecking labor — in one move. It doesn’t make the project engineer’s calls; it replaces the layout worker with the tape and the chalk box who used to spend all day snapping lines.

This isn’t a demo. The FieldPrint Platform has printed more than 100 million square feet on real jobsites, and the customers are top US general contractors — Mortenson, McCarthy, Skanska — with DPR running it on its hardest hospital projects. Twenty confirmed production deployments means it’s crossed the line from pilot to repeatable, scope-priced everyday use. The 2026 Certified Partner Program goes further: contractors can run it themselves, no Dusty crew required — the signal of a scale-up.

Why we care for LostJobs

Construction is the overlooked employment front in this catalog. Everyone watches the humanoids in factories and misses that jobsite automation has crept from piling and material handling all the way into a niche trade like layout. FieldPrinter 2 matters not because it replaces the whole crew, but because it cleanly removes the labor in one task: setting out the lines.

These roles are a familiar profile — not the highest-skill work, but on-site, physical, hard to staff, and error-prone, which is exactly what robots target first. When one machine does in a day what a crew did in several, more accurately, the “layout labor” line on the jobsite budget keeps shrinking. If your job is reading the drawings and marking the slab, a robot already running on Mortenson and Skanska sites is the early warning written for you.