Raise Robotics to discuss scaling field robots at RoboBusiness
The Autonomous Mobile Fabricator operates as a ground-level AGV or mounts directly onto any Genie MEWP platform. | An early-stage construction robot reaches a customer at roughly 80% of the capability that the customer needs.
Whether that program crosses to 120% is not a hardware problem; it’s a leadership decision. Where do you spend finite engineering capacity, and where do you build operator discipline instead? At RoboBusiness 2026, Kenrick Tjandra, who leads robotics deployment at Raise Robotics, will talk about “Closing the Capability Gap: A Leadership Framework for Scaling Field Robotics.” RoboBusiness takes place Oct. 20 and 21 in Santa Clara, Calif. The session will start at 1:15 p.m. ET on the first day of the show. Raise Robotics holds the U.S. commercial record for autonomous robots installing building envelopes at the leading edge of buildings under construction. The San Francisco-based company has completed 10 projects across eight states, as well as over 4,528 robot-hours, with zero safety incidents. From that record, Tjandra has built a repeatable decision framework, now peer-reviewed by Project Production Institute, which answers the question every scaling robotics team faces: Do you build the product fix, or write the operator playbook? Kenrick will ground his talk in two failures that shaped the framework, then walk through the framework: Sampling bias: Your first three sites don’t represent your next 30. Margin stacking: Independently-defensible tolerances consume each other in series (truck → forklift → hoist → doorway → floor) until a comfortable margin is gone. The framework itself: It includes a resource taxonomy, a three-tier build-vs-workaround model, and a capability-envelope-versus-observed- variance method for anticipating where a system breaks next. Attendees leave with a decision rule for allocating engineering capacity, a vocabulary for two hidden failure modes, and the pre-mobilization gates that keep field programs from stalling; the discipline that separates a demo from a system that scales. Meet Kenrick Tjandra Tjandra leads robotics deployment at Raise Robotics.
