Autonomous construction layout robot

MERGEN
M-02 It drives the bare slab and prints the building plan — walls, columns, plumbing, fixtures — straight onto the concrete. No tape measure, no chalk line.

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How it works

From an empty slab to a full layout — autonomously.

Today a crew snaps the building outline onto the floor by hand: tape, chalk lines, hours of measuring, and drift on every corner. MERGEN does it itself, accurately, in one pass.

01

Read the plan

Load the floor plan — partitions, columns, window openings, plumbing, kitchen casework, room labels. Every element becomes a colour-coded layer the robot will lay down.

DXF / plan → layers
02

Drive the slab

A differential drive on two NEMA-23 closed-loop steppers carries it across the pour, routing cleanly around the columns and roughed-in plumbing already standing on the deck.

Closed-loop drive · obstacle-aware
03

Know exactly where it is

A Unitree L2 LiDAR feeds FAST-LIO SLAM to pin the robot to the slab within ±2 cm — drift-free. Closed-loop encoders catch every step. Accuracy is the whole point: the Blind Tank's job is to not drift.

LiDAR SLAM · ±2 cm
04

Print the layout

A custom marker toolhead drops a felt pen with a laser reference and draws each line where it belongs — then TIJ-prints the room labels in straight passes. Walls, windows, fixtures and casework go down in their own colours.

Marker toolhead · TIJ text
05

Ready to build

What's left is a complete, accurate, colour-coded plan on the concrete — every wall, door, and fixture marked exactly where the trades need it. Hours of layout, done unattended.

Full plan · trade-ready
Walls Windows Plumbing Kitchen Room labels
Under the shell

Built for precision, not horsepower.

Drive
2× NEMA-23 closed-loop
Magnetic-encoder steppers · differential drive · zero step loss
Localization
Unitree L2 LiDAR
360°×96° scan · FAST-LIO SLAM · drift-free to ±2 cm
Compute
Pi 5 + Teensy 4.1
ROS 2 brain · real-time 600 MHz motor & sensor MCU
Toolhead
Custom marker Z
In-house pen actuator · laser reference · ±1 mm mark
Sensing
9-DoF IMU + ToF
Front time-of-flight ranging · edge & obstacle detection
Power
36 V Li-ion
Hot-swap pack · all-day layout on a charge

See it come apart.

A cinematic teardown of every part, an interactive 3D model, and the full bill of materials — all in one place.