Designed, Molded, & Delivered

This week: design of a part is in mold (paid), quest for better boxes, sneaker upper spray on, software into sales advantage, forecasting foundational model, automation controllers, on-demand partners

May 25, 2025

∙ Paid

Shop Talk

Capturing this week's zeitgeist

Automate 2025 is in the books, next up in automation conference season are Siemens’ Realize LIVE 2025 and automatica, both happening in June. Realize LIVE splits into two regional events: Americas in Detroit June 2-5 with 450+ sessions, and Europe in Amsterdam June 30-July 2 with 350+ sessions. automatica runs June 24-27 in Munich as the world's leading robotics and automation trade fair, expecting 40,000 visitors and 650 exhibitors. Both events emphasize AI, digitalization, and sustainable production, with customer-led sessions showcasing real-world implementations.

Assembly Line

This week's most influential Industry 4.0 media.

📦 International Paper Is on a Quest to Build a Better Cardboard Box

✍️ Author: Ryan Dezember

Cardboard boxes have become a reliable economic indicator. The better the economy, the more corrugated packaging is consumed—not just for Amazon.com deliveries, but to move everything from factory parts to fruits and vegetables around the country.

Silvernail said he wants International Paper to operate more like its recent acquisition, DS Smith. The European company is known for making corrugated packaging that is as good at protecting merchandise in transit as on supermarket shelves. DS Smith adds about one million box designs to International Paper’s library of roughly two million. One DS Smith design that Silvernail admires is a display-ready carton for a confectioner. It is fitted with an elastic strap to keep chocolate bars pushed to the front and visible to customers. Sales of the candy rose once the design was deployed, Silvernail said.

👟 How On Running Shoes Are Taking On Nike And Adidas

CNBC visited On’s headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland to get a behind-the-scenes look at the company and how its shoes are made.

Using Carbon’s Design Engine and EPU Pro, we’ve engineered an inflatable midsole that mimics the softness of marshmallows, without sacrificing strength. /YouTube/

🗜️ The Tech Stack Advantage: Turing Software into a Sales Tool for Machine Shops

When you're launching or scaling a machine shop, it’s easy to think of software as a cost—something you "have to have" just to get by. But what if your tech stack could become your sharpest competitive edge?

Metalworking can lead directly to savings with Fastenal’s metalworking program /YouTube/

🪏 Who pays for cutting carbon out of making cement?

Many in the sector agree that decarbonisation of cement, one of the world’s most ubiquitous commodities, is possible and potentially even profitable. The question is: who pays for the transition and which strategies should be prioritised?

The most effective way to cut up to 40 per cent of cement emissions is to substitute a portion of clinker with lower-carbon materials, such as fly ash or slag, known as “supplementary cementitious materials” (SCMs). Unlike many industrial decarbonisation measures, using SCMs also lowers costs, helping to garner widespread support from the cement industry for this method.

🖨️ What Happens When You Row Across the Pacific Ocean With 3D Printed Parts?

In April 2025, the Maclean brothers set out to do something never done before — row 9,000 miles across the entire Pacific Ocean, from Peru to Australia, completely unsupported. And the crazy part? They’re using 50 3D printed parts to make their journey possible.

World’s tallest 3D-printed building completed in the Swiss Alps /Archinect News/
Westinghouse to explore additive manufacture of nuclear parts with Metal Powder Works materials /TCT/

🐼 Panda: A pretrained forecast model for universal representation of chaotic dynamics

✍️ Author: Jeffrey Lai, Anthony Bao, William Gilpin

Chaotic systems are intrinsically sensitive to small errors, challenging efforts to construct predictive data-driven models of real-world dynamical systems such as fluid flows or neuronal activity. Prior efforts comprise either specialized models trained separately on individual time series, or foundation models trained on vast time series databases with little underlying dynamical structure. Motivated by dynamical systems theory, we present Panda, Patched Attention for Nonlinear DynAmics. We train Panda on a novel synthetic, extensible dataset of 2×104 chaotic dynamical systems that we discover using an evolutionary algorithm. Trained purely on simulated data, Panda exhibits emergent properties: zero-shot forecasting of unseen real world chaotic systems, and nonlinear resonance patterns in cross-channel attention heads. Despite having been trained only on low-dimensional ordinary differential equations, Panda spontaneously develops the ability to predict partial differential equations without retraining. We demonstrate a neural scaling law for differential equations, underscoring the potential of pretrained models for probing abstract mathematical domains like nonlinear dynamics.

Read more at arXiv and William Gilpin on X

Humanoid Policy ~ Human Policy to train a human-humanoid behavior policy, which we term Human Action Transformer (HAT) /Apple on GitHub/

New Product Introduction

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

🏭 Introducing TRUMPF's Newest Smart Factory

TRUMPF's newest Smart Factory is located at its North American headquarters in Farmington, Connecticut.

🦾🧠 MachineMind: Vention’s AI Brain Boosts Automation

✍️ Author: Stephanie Leonida

Vention announced the commercial availability of its AI-driven, Bell-connectivity-enhanced third-generation industrial automation controller, MachineMotion AI. The latest controller iteration boasts integrated Bell and WiFi connectivity, secure cloud connectivity, compatibility with top-tier robotics brands, hassle-free programming, plug-and-play integration, a compact design, and simulation capabilities.

Bell-powered connectivity runs independently of local firewalls and networks, allowing manufacturers and other industrial players to tap into system monitoring, software updates, cloud programming, and live support securely and in real-time. This configuration, along with WiFi connectivity, makes it possible to update software and firmware over-the-air (OTA), access Vention RemoteSupport directly through the pendant, and use cloud analytics for AI-driven improvement and performance monitoring.

🦾 ABB deploys PixelPaint at Mercedes-Benz plant in Germany

ABB claimed that the technology is both sustainable and resource-saving. The company began operation in the facility earlier this year and has helped Mercedes-Benz adapt to its new personalized options for its most exclusive models.

Gas consumption down 40 percent thanks to Fronius intelligent control /IMD/

TradingView chart — TransDigm Group and Servotronics, Inc. Announce Acquisition /PR Newswire/ while ESCO Announces Divestiture of VACCO Industries /GlobeNewswire/

Business Transactions

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

🇩🇪 remberg secures €15M to help European industries save nearly €500B in annual revenue loss using AI

remberg, an AI-based maintenance platform, raised €15M in a Series A+ round. Acton Capital and Oxx led the funding, joined by Earlybird, Speedinvest, and Fly Ventures. remberg will use the funds to expand operations across Europe and accelerate development of its AI-based maintenance platform, including adding predictive maintenance features, while also growing its sales and market presence in key European regions.

When equipment fails, a worker scans a QR code on the machine to open an AI chat assistant in remberg. Using the machine’s records and data, the assistant supplies troubleshooting steps so staff can fix the problem faster.

🇩🇪 sensmore raises €6.4M to turn world’s largest machines into intelligent robots

sensmore, a robotics startup, has secured $7.3M (approximately €6.4M) in a funding round led by Point Nine Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on SaaS, AI, and B2B marketplaces

Founded by Maximilian Rolf (CEO) and Bjarne Johannsen (CTO), sensmore specializes in Physical AI to turn the world’s largest mobile machines into intelligent robots. With this technology, the company aims to address the labour shortages across sectors like construction, mining, and raw materials. As a full-system provider, it retrofits fleets like wheel loaders and haul trucks with a modular platform integrating end-to-end AI and Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAMs). “That means faster deployment, lower cost, and smarter, more adaptive machines at fleet scale,” says Rolf. This enables real-time automation of complex tasks such as load & carry in production environments where it was previously out of reach.

Read more at Silicon Canals and TFN

nanoVLM: The simplest repository to train your VLM in pure PyTorch /Hugging Face/

Palantir and Divergent Form Partnership to Revolutionize On-Demand Advanced Manufacturing

Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: PLTR) and Divergent Technologies, Inc. (Divergent) announced a strategic partnership to provide access to Divergent's leading advanced manufacturing capabilities via Palantir's industry-leading software platform, bringing digitally manufactured parts to Warp Speed and Foundry customers on-demand.

The partnership provides Palantir's defense and commercial customers with seamless access to Divergent's digital manufacturing capabilities in production environments. With access to the Divergent Adaptive Production System (DAPS™) within Palantir's software, customers will be able to rapidly identify emerging supply chain vulnerabilities and then directly address them through on-demand manufacturing of critical parts by Divergent.