Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving things

Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving things the size of bricks rather than I beams, do you want to see what happens when two hovering robots each carrying a brick 5 metres off the ground bump into each other and suddenly stop hovering? Or if they start creating turbulence for each other and interfere with flight even without contact? Even if it doesn't get regulated by law the insurance implications would force de facto regulation. Lots of small components means more joints. With a brick as our example that's fine but I'm not convinced the gain over a squad of fairly cheap bricklayers is there - with a girder frame structure as is more typical for large commercial premises that means for the same design it's simultaneously weaker, heavier and more expensive. Not a trio of attributes I'd want to apply to my structure. This is a sort of technology I love, that's clearly very interesting and with all sorts of potential. But I don't see construction as the ideal target market for it, by a long way. Freight unloading would have been a great case had it not gone containerised some years ago. Warehouse order picking as with Amazon et al? Perhaps. You can have the storage floor as a controlled space without people underneath which reduces the safety issues and there wouldn't be the same problem with noise nuisance. If we wanted to go down that road though I'm not sure it's a big enough win over cranes / arms and conveyor belts, or that either is a win over fairly cheap people pushing trolleys (having worked alongside exactly that in the past). If we want to stick with construction it would make good sense for use in hazardous environments because it would provide a way of deploying a large, highly mobile force to an area where you couldn't deploy human labour (or where that deployment becomes severely impractical / unattractive for whatever reason - see the film 'Moon' for example), but I'm not sure that's a large enough market to justify the expense of developing the tech enough to make it fully usable. There doesn't seem to currently be a shortage of labour prepared to go and work in Siberian gold mines or northern Canadian tar sands quarries, for the right price, and I can't see the power technology for these devices scaling to the point to make them likely cheaper any time soon to invest in it. Cool tech searching for a better application IMHO. I'd love to see that better application though and would be heading down there to watch when it happened.