Capitalizing on the Industrial Autonomy Boom

This week: Automate 2025 plan (paid), $600B autonomous freight market, additive for waterways, multimodal AI robots with a sense of touch, machine fitness tracking, and the techno-industrial playbook.

May 11, 2025

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Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

This week marks a watershed moment for autonomous transportation. Aurora Innovation completed the first fully driverless commercial freight delivery on a public highway, traveling from Dallas to Houston without a human in the cab. This technological milestone heralds an economic transformation that DoT research suggests will generate hundreds of thousands of new positions, while expanding total commerce through enhanced logistics capacity and creating entirely new business ecosystems around the technology. As the industry projects a $600 billion autonomous trucking market by 2035, the question becomes not whether this technology will transform freight transportation, but whether your business is positioned to capitalize on the most significant supply chain revolution since containerization.

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

Caterpillar—A Bold New Era of Manufacturing and Assembly

✍️ Author: Austin Weber

“The most advanced production systems in heavy fabrication can be found in Caterpillar’s East Peoria plant, which has 56 robots…and close to 35 vision systems operating today….There are 17 robotic systems at the Decatur plant—all of them big.”

“Robotic welding gets more of our employees out from under the hood and gives them a chance to focus on other critical areas in our manufacturing process,” explained a fabrication process engineer at the Decatur plant. “Our manufacturing environment is much more high-tech than in years past. Gone is the perception that working in a factory is dirty, unpleasant work. Today's welder needs to understand high-tech robotic welding systems and how these systems interact with other manufacturing systems elsewhere in the plant.”

3D-Printed Replacement Part Keeps Critical Waterway Open

The Poe Lock is the largest of the Soo Locks and features a ship arrestor system (including a 3.5"-diameter rope lifted into place by a 12-foot-long lever arm) to protect its watertight miter doors from damage. When the lever arm was discovered to have cracked, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers worked to find a replacement. Lincoln Electric produced the replacement arm using wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), and it has now been in operation for more than a year.

Kind Designs raises additional $5m to advance 3D printed seawalls /TCT/
Forming quality evaluation of 3D printed lines and layers with cement-based materials under different process parameters /Rapid Prototyping Journal/
University of Illinois launches 3D printing facility with $8m DOD award /TCT/

Revving Up Manufacturing with Okuma & Sandvik Coromant

In this episode of Shop Matters, Okuma's Brandon Glenn sits down with Chris Peluso and Kyla Sapp from Sandvik Coromant on the campus of their mutual long-term partner, Richard Childress Racing. In addition to RCR's evolution from racing to aerospace and beyond as RCR Manufacturing Solutions, they discuss how collaboration, tooling advancements, workforce development, and manufacturing wellness drive success for their customers and the industry.

Meet the Robots Revolutionizing the Wood Products Industry | 7robotics

Go behind the scenes of Tesla’s gigafactory /YouTube/
Inside Europe's Most Ambitious Construction Startup, Monumental /YouTube/
Satellite images reveal Huawei’s advanced chip production line in China /FT/

Making Ultra Precision Toolroom Spindles

Design and build a high-precision spin grinding unit for a surface grinder. This unit will improve the precision of the Toolroom spindle parts shown in video #2 of the series to minimize the time required for final lapping. A method of lapping the rollers of the facial needle bearing to improve the runout from 10 microinches to 3 microinches is shown. The design of a differential screw system to provide one arc second resolution to the tilt system is covered.

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

Introducing Vulcan: Amazon's first robot with a sense of touch

✍️ Author: Alex Davies

Our fulfillment centers maximize efficiency by storing inventory in fabric-covered pods divided into compartments about a foot square, each of which holds up to 10 items on average. Fitting an item into or plucking one out of this crowded space has historically been challenging for robots that lack the natural dexterity of humans.

Vulcan is our first robot with a similar kind of finesse. Vulcan can effortlessly manipulate objects within those compartments to make room for whatever it’s stowing, because it knows when it makes contact and how much force it’s applying, and can stop short of doing any damage.

Dyson Founder on Products He Regrets Scrapping, Dyson EV, and More

Incat launches world’s largest battery electric ship /Manufacturers' Monthly/
Inside the Skywell EV Motor: Lessons Learned from BYD’s 10-Year-Old Design /Munro on YouTube/

π0.5: a VLA with Open-World Generalization

The main principle behind π0.5 is co-training on heterogeneous data: by training our VLA model on a variety of different data sources, we can teach it not only how to perform diverse skills physically, but also how to understand the semantic context of each skill (e.g., if the task is to clean the kitchen, what are appropriate objects to pick up and put away, and where to put them), infer the high-level structure of a task (e.g., the steps required to make a bed), and even transfer physical behaviors from other robots (e.g., simpler robots that have one arm or no mobile base, or data from robots in less diverse environments).

B&R presents AI-enhanced fitness tracking for machines

B&R launched two industrial IoT apps that enable AI-powered optimization of machine health and performance. Designed for open integration into any platform, IIoT Connector is the core enabler of data-driven services, providing flexible access to B&R device data across edge and cloud environments. Building on this data, ACOPOStrak Monitor applies AI-based analysis to support real-time performance optimization and predictive maintenance of B&R's adaptive product transport solutions.

Resilience in an Era of Trade Uncertainty

David Rogers

May 7

Resilience in an Era of Trade Uncertainty

Escalating trade tensions and unpredictable tariff policies create opportunities for forward-thinking manufacturers to reimagine their operations through strategic technology deployments. While disruptive, the most successful companies have recognized that tariffs create compelling incentives to accelerate digital transformation initiatives that might otherwise languish on roadmaps.

Read full story

Business Transactions

This week's top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

Rotunda Capital Partners Closes Oversubscribed Fund IV at $735 Million focused on industrial businesses /Business Wire/
Raiven Capital Launches $100M Climatech Fund Anchored by Frog Lake First Nation investing in Scalable Climatech /PR Newswire/
Bosch strengthens startups with new round of ~$270 million in sixth venture capital fund /Bosch/

🇺🇸 Redaptive Secures $650M Credit Facility from CDPQ and Nuveen to Expand Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) Platform

Redaptive, a leading Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) provider, announced the successful closing of a $650 million credit facility from CDPQ, a global investment group, and Nuveen, the investment manager of TIAA. This facility strengthens Redaptive's ability to scale its innovative platform, meet accelerating customer demand, and deliver measurable business value through energy efficiency, renewable generation, and data-driven building performance.

Redaptive can now expand its investment in physical asset infrastructure across large enterprise portfolios, enabling customers to reduce operating costs, enhance resilience, and meet long-term business growth and sustainability goals — all without the end users' upfront capital or added operational complexity. Redaptive's platform combines flexible finance structures, AI-powered insights, and proprietary metering technology to turn energy and infrastructure into a strategic engine of efficiency and performance.

🇮🇳 ReNew Secures $100 Million Marquee Investment From BII to Boost India’s Solar Manufacturing Ecosystem

ReNew Energy Global Plc, a leading decarbonisation solutions company, has secured an INR 8700 million (US$100 million) investment from British International Investment, the UK’s development finance institution and impact investor, to accelerate the growth of its solar manufacturing business in India. The investment will be made in ReNew Photovoltaics Private Limited, ReNew’s dedicated solar manufacturing subsidiary in India.

🇺🇸 Alta Resource Technologies Expands Series Seed Funding to $10M to Scale Protein-Based Critical Minerals Technology

Alta Resource Technologies, a pioneer in using advanced biochemistry to transform mineral separation, announced that it has expanded its Series Seed funding to $10 million with the close of an additional $4.4 million investment. The Seed 2 investment was co-led by DCVC and Voyager Ventures with participation from Orion Industrial Ventures and In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit strategic investor for the U.S. national security community and America’s allies.

The new capital will accelerate the development and commercialization of Alta’s breakthrough platform, which uses engineered proteins to selectively bind to and separate critical minerals, including rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, from low-grade ores and complex waste streams. The approach promises to dramatically reduce mineral extraction's environmental impact while helping secure domestic supply chains for essential materials used in advanced electronics, clean energy technologies, and modern defense systems.