Kajima moves FieldAI's autonomy onto 10+ Japanese building sites after 2,000 robot rounds

Kajima has moved robots running FieldAI's autonomy software from trials into regular use on its construction sites, the Japanese contractor said on Nov. 5. The robots have completed more than 2,000 autonomous rounds across several robot types, tasks and sites, and since a 2025 agreement with FieldAI they have gone to more than 10 sites in Japan in about a year. Kajima says the point is continuous use on live projects, where the building and the stacks of material change every day.

The job Kajima handed over is the engineer's walk: patrolling, photographing and measuring the site. Patrol is also one of the first two tasks its rival Shimizu chose for robots, but Shimizu's route runs through humanoids from Noble Machines, with physical tests on actual sites only from spring 2027 (Shimizu and Noble Machines). Kajima skipped the new body. It mounts an autonomy unit, made of cameras, LiDAR and an edge AI device, on off-the-shelf general-purpose robots, and FieldAI's Field Foundation Models decide where it is safe to move.

The unit maps the site and redraws it each round

On first start a robot explores an unknown area and builds a 3D map. On later rounds it avoids obstacles, updates the map, takes photos and point-cloud scans, then returns to its charger and uploads the data, which is sorted and posted to the web. The processing runs on the robot, so it also works indoors, underground and anywhere satellite positioning or outside communications drop out. Kajima says FieldAI's models pair data-driven learning with physics-based reasoning and uncertainty estimates, which lets the robot keep working in situations it was not trained on.

Kajima uses the robots for three jobs so far: security patrols on days off, late at night and early in the morning, flashing LEDs and sounding an alert when they spot something wrong; scans of the whole site for progress checks; and disaster recovery, where a robot goes in after an earthquake or heavy rain before anyone has confirmed the site is safe.