The tried-and-true approach to layout is to hire surveyors to establish the control points and offsets on your jobsite. This identifies where you will need to set up batter boards that hold the drylines to locate foundation lines, anchor bolts, or metal embeds in industrial settings. Workers then use hand levels or plumb bobs to transfer points from string lines to the precise location. If the wind is blowing hard enough to move the strings, that can impact accuracy. Contractors often bring the survey team back to a project to check on the accuracy of the layout work. But there are many ways to go wrong in this process and the work is time consuming. So concrete contractors who specialize in industrial construction work are beginning to look for a better way: their own total stations and robotic total stations to improve accuracy and to reduce costs.

Total stations once were complex and were only used by surveyors. Surveying equipment-manufacturers, such as Leica, Topcon, Trimble, and Sokkia, realized, though, that contractors could increase efficiency by doing their own layouts. This inspired the development of much more user-friendly instruments that meet the needs of contractors. Since employing a surveying team every time a contractor needs to check a location is impractical, survey teams are typically brought in only to locate the points marking the property limits. Contractors then use those points to locate their instruments and begin the process of locating points on the jobsite.

In the progression of optical layout equipment, the classic levels could transfer vertical dimensions from one point to another, then with a steel tape measure and some trigonometry the surveyor could locate any point. With the development of theodolites in the 1960s and 70s, surveyors could lay out precise angles in both the vertical and horizontal directions. Total stations evolved from theodolites, adding electronic distance measurement (EDM), completely doing away with tape measures.

Robotic total stations take total station technology one step further. By adding radio communication to receivers on the rod and servo motors to the instrument, it's now possible for the instrument to follow the rod and send information about the location of points to the person at the end. The big difference between a total station and a robotic total station for most applications is that two people are needed to mark points using a total station, while one person can easily operate a robotic total station.