Meet Your New Helper Collaborative robots or “cobots” are emerging as a way to increase productivity and safety by shouldering grunt work on job sites. By Tim Kridel, Freelance Writer
54
October 2025 • www.ecmweb.com
Photo courtesy of Rosendin Electric
F
or decades, robots labored almost exclusively in factories, where cages, fences, and other physical barriers kept people at a safe distance to avoid injury. In the mid-1990s, the concept expanded to “cobots,” which are designed to work safely alongside people. Hence their name, which is short for “collaborative robots.” Today, cobots are increasingly found outside factories, too, including construction sites. One recent example is the cobot Rosendin Electric developed for installing panels at solar farms (see Photo 1). Their levels of autonomy run the gamut. Some are like apprentices who don’t need continuous, direct supervision, while others are closer to forklifts, not budging without a human at the controls. By going beyond what most people consider robots, cobots show that there’s a wider range of use cases and business benefits, including ones that are relatively easy and inexpensive to implement with existing workflows. For example, many cobot use cases center around safety, such as the remote cable cutters that Tri-City Electric uses. “In an industrial facility, we may have multiple cable sets, and the scope of work is to demo just one,” says Travis Keeney, vice president of risk management at the Davenport, Iowa-based firm. “That cable set may be running alongside the others, meaning some are energized. When you’re dealing with long cable runs like that, there’s a lot of potential for human error in misidentifying the intended cable. We’ve had some near misses over the years where the wrong cable was cut — the energized cable.
Photo 1. Rosendin Electric used this three-piece robotic system to transform utilityscale solar projects in West Texas by tripling installation speeds, enhancing worker safety, and addressing the industry’s persistent labor shortage.
With remote cable cutters, employees can set everything up and stand back from a safe distance. If worst case (they do cut the wrong cable), at least they’re not in harm’s way.” In other cases, cobots are used to maximize productivity while minimizing downtime. One example is the LineWise Triple Line Lifters that Great Southwestern Construction uses on energized power lines for electric utilities and other clients. “There’s no interruption, so there’s no loss of revenue to the utility,” says Billy Walsh, Great Southwestern Construction director of training. “It allows us to take all the energized conductors and keep it in a very controlled setting.
The linemen do it all with remote control from 100 feet in the air. They can use it in a horizontal or a vertical setting — whatever that setup requires. We can do anything from a distribution voltage up to 500kV in the transmission world. There’s a whole series of robotic arms with capacities anywhere from 300 to 5,000 pounds per phase.”
ANOTHER OPTION FOR OVERCOMING LABOR SHORTAGES
Other trades increasingly use cobots, so it’s worth looking for use cases that could be adapted to electrical. One example is Emery Sapp & Sons (ESS), which specializes in large civil construction projects.